


Excuses for Why We Failed at Love

by Lily (alyelle)



Series: Excuses for Why We Failed at Love [1]
Category: The Mighty Boosh RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-04
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-10 09:24:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 34,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/784458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alyelle/pseuds/Lily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirty-four snapshots of a sixteen year relationship from two alternating points of view. Most probably AU in places.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 01 (May 1997) / 02 (March 1998)

_i was wandering the derelict car park of your heart, looking for a ride home_  
 _[may 1997]_  


Noel hates endings. 

He doesn’t mind beginnings. Nerves aside, they’re usually quite fun. And middles are good; everything is comfortable and familiar in the middle. Middles are warm reds and soothing browns. But everything about endings is wrong. Endings dig into his skin sharply.

“Here?” Julian asks.

“Yeah, that’ll do.” 

Noel sits dead still for a second, fingers hovering over the lock of his seatbelt. He looks across the road to his flat through the misty windscreen of Julian’s car. He looks at Julian, who’s looking at him, eyebrows slightly furrowed.

“Thanks,” he says. Lengthening the middle, delaying the inevitable. “For the lift.”

“S’fine.” Julian smiles, a half-sardonic snort and a twitch of his mouth that’s becoming rapidly familiar, and Noel can’t let it end, not yet.

“D’you wanna come in?” he asks in a rush, fiddling with his belt and his bag so he doesn’t have to see the reaction to his question. “For tea? Or coffee? I normally drink tea but there’s probably coffee somewhere if…”

He’s made the mistake of looking up; Julian’s still watching, amusement and curiousness warring genteelly across his face. He’s about to apologise, make a joke about how completely bent that sounded when Julian nods.

“Yeah, why not?”

Noel forces a deadpan to stop himself from squealing or asking something completely ridiculous like _“Really_?”. He says instead, in his best serious voice, “The thing is though, you must know - if you come in, you can never leave.”

Julian’s amusement wins its war. His laugh, so loud in the tiny space, feels like sunshine painting itself onto Noel’s skin. “That’s alright. I haven’t got much on anyway.”

Noel bites back a grin and leaps from the car. 

No one else is home when they get inside, which isn’t surprising. The dishes have been done and put away though, which _is_ surprising, and Noel sends a mental thank you to whichever little fairy came along and tidied up. Then he sends a mental slap to himself for being such a girl, and fills the kettle.

“So… tea?”

“Yeah. Milk, no sugar.”

“Pfft. Could’ve guessed that. How strong?”

“Just leave the tea bag in, it’ll be right.” Julian eyes him thoughtfully. “Bet you take about six sugars in yours, don’t you?”

“Three, actually.”

“And half a pint of milk.”

“Nah, I like mine strong too. For the caffeine.”

“Hmm. Full of surprises, aren’t you?” The half-smirk is back at the corner of Julian’s mouth. Noel waggles his eyebrows.

“That’s me. I’m the man of many surprises. They call me The Surpriser.”

“Yeah, I bet they do.”

He picks up both cups, ushers Julian into the front room ahead of him, and sets them down carefully on the little coffee table. He fidgets as he sits down at the other end of the sofa, nervous energy plucking at his limbs, but it’s smoothed away as he and Julian talk, worn down and buffed and polished. Their words are water, flowing between them. They’re river opals, glittering and blazing. They move with them, glowing and growing into tropical birds and cartoon jungle animals, hardening into brilliant ice crystals and polar bears. They build homes on the walls of Noel’s flat.

“And then,” Noel gestures with his empty tea cup excitedly, “then I’d sneak in, in disguise, and rescue you!”

Julian snorts. “You’d never. Look at you, you’re about as intimidating as a butterfly stuck to a marshmallow. You’d get yourself captured in thirty seconds.”

“As if I would!”

“They’d hardly even raise a sweat.”

“I’m a Cockney bitch, they’d break their pygmy fingers on me.”

“You’re a Twiglet. They’d have you helpless on the ground with a light tickle.” 

To demonstrate his point, Julian leans over, dancing his fingers up Noel’s ribcage. Noel squawks involuntarily and Julian grins like the proverbial wolf, increasing the pressure as he reaches his underarms. He squirms and shifts away, pressing himself into the furthest corner of the sofa, but Julian simply kneels up, pins one of his wrists up behind his head, and continues with his free hand.

“Okay, okay, stop,” Noel gasps through his laughter, “please, you’re not fucking fair, _stop_.”

And Julian does, grinning down at him like a demon. 

Noel takes a deep breath, closing his eyes for a moment, delighting in the way the air fills his lungs. Then he takes another, and opens them to see Julian watching him. He’s sat back on his haunches, head tipped ever so slightly sideways. There’s a tiny ‘v’ creasing the space between his eyebrows. It’s a gaze that makes Noel feel like nothing so much as a complicated experiment, and his nerves from earlier come rushing back up-river, heavy and dull once more in the pit of his stomach. He feels his eyes growing wider and wider as the seconds pass. He feels his teeth catch around his bottom lip.

Julian’s face softens, and before Noel can even notice he’s moving, he’s leant in and placed a quick, light peck on the tip of his nose.

Noel’s breath freezes in his lungs. Julian huffs a pleased little puff of air, like he’s just uncovered one of life’s great mysteries, and settles himself back down. Noel stays where he is, utterly still, sure he’s never going to even _blink_ again.

“Bollocks,” Julian says, picking up his tea cup and peering into it. He waves it at Noel, showing off the empty inside. “Make us another, would you?”

 _“What?”_ he squeaks. He’s pretty sure there are rules about what you can say after you kiss someone on the nose. He’s pretty sure ‘get us a tea, love’ isn’t one of them. “What am I, your wife?”

“Yep,” Julian replies with a snicker. “If we walked down the street right now, people would say ‘Hey look, it’s Tom Selleck and his Indian wife.’”

Noel has absolutely nothing to top that, so he settles for an expression of mock outrage and flings a cushion at Julian before grabbing their mugs. 

By the time he’s walked back to the kitchen, his face is decorated with a mile-wide grin.

They drink two more cups each before Julian finally leaves. The wee hours are filled with the scribbling of punchlines onto loose bits of paper and the flapping of their hands, faster and more outlandish with each successive idea. Nigel and Dave stumble in bleary-eyed at half three, and Noel mumbles his goodnights distractedly as he sketches the beginnings of costumes. When he walks Julian out to his car, the sun is just breaking across the dark band of horizon.

“That was genius,” he breathes softly, unwilling to disturb the dawn. Julian nods.

“Sorry I’ve got to – ” he yawns and doesn’t bother finishing the sentence. “I’m knackered.”

“Nah, s’fine,” Noel says. “We can finish it later. I can make up the sofa for you to stay next time. I mean – if you like.”

“Yeah,” Julian says. He looks completely shattered, Noel thinks guiltily, but his eyes are shining in the half-light like rich espresso. “Yeah, I would.”

He watches Julian drive away and tiptoes back inside, closing the door behind him with the softest of clicks. The tea cups are still on the coffee table and he picks them up as he walks through, sitting them in the sink and boiling the kettle for the fourth time. 

He falls asleep at the table twenty minutes later, his head full of tea and Yorkshire.

  


_i’m lovely and lonely_  
 _[march 1998]_  


Rich Fulcher claims Noel immediately.

He’d known they’d get on - they couldn’t not; Rich acts like a child ninety percent of the time, and Noel just seems to _be_ one in a grown up’s body, all awkward limbs and wide blue eyes – but Julian still finds himself wishing he hadn’t been quite so right about it. For six months now those eyes have sought him out in the darknesses of tiny pubs and tinier theatres. They’ve blazed manic blue fire from across scratched café tables while he and Noel have drunk terrible coffee and written worse sketches. They’ve sparkled enough at even his most dreadful jokes that he’s started to feel capable. Worthwhile. Funny. Now they’re sparkling at every new nonsense Rich spurts.

They’re sat together, off to one side of the little park they’re filming in, on the bench they use for the zookeeper skit. Julian studies them from his spot on the grass. Noel’s still got most of his costume on, despite the fact that they’ve been given an hour for lunch. He looks ridiculous, even without the hat. His hair’s sticking out sideways at crazy angles. He’s got his legs crossed like a girl, one over the top of the other, hands clasped together in his lap. And Julian’s trying not to stare but every so often Rich says something that makes Noel tip his head back and laugh and laugh, and he can’t bring himself to look away from that vulnerable expanse of throat or the unabashed joy on his face.

He should be more bothered by the compulsion, he thinks. He’s a grown man, not a high school girl with an unrequited crush.

The thought brings a self-directed snort in its wake. He thinks back to the first night he spent at Noel’s, the first time they drank tea and never slept. He’ll happily admit that he’d thought the kid who kept following him around was a bit weird. They’ve joked about it with everyone they know. The dialogue from the car has been honed and polished, awkward pauses and fumbling looks deleted, and now it’s a proper pithy anecdote. A says _If you come in, you can never leave_ ; B responds in kind. _That’s fine, I haven’t got much on anyway._ But all of that weirdness, all Noel’s eager babbling, melted away under the weight of the images he drew with his words. When he spoke, his stories shone in the air. When he smiled, his eyes no longer seemed too big for the rest of him and his nose crinkled up like a bunny rabbit from a children’s story.

Julian’s turned these memories over in his mind so often he’s surprised they’re not fraying at the edges. He does it again now, letting them drift back like faded polaroids. Noel gasping for breath, pale and flushed and perfect. His own body, filling with confidence and clarity, until he felt tall instead of just gangly. The smooth, cold tip of a nose under his lips. He remembers time spilling and slowing, and that he’d wondered afterwards how long it had really been. A second. A lifetime. Not nearly long enough.

He’s been back to Noel’s flat any number of times. He’s lost count of how many dawns he they’ve seen in together. But he’s never touched him again, and Noel’s never mentioned it. He’s just laughed at all Julian’s jokes, and called him _brilliant_ and _genius_ , and if he’s spent a little too long the few times they’ve actually got some sleep making sure Julian’s alright on the spare mattress – well, maybe he’s still a little weird. Because who in their right mind would want the attention of unknown Northern comedian who looks like a geography teacher? 

Noel laughs again, head tipped back to the sky, and Julian wonders if maybe it was never him at all. Maybe it’s just attention in general Noel thrives on. 

Noel chooses that moment to gaze across the grassy expanse between them, grin still spread wide across his face. He waves when he catches sight of Julian, with both hands, like a small child.

“Ju!”

He’s up off the bench and calling something backwards over his shoulder at Rich before Julian can even wave back. Julian picks at his sandwich crusts and tries to look like he’s been doing something other than staring at him for the past ten minutes.

Noel practically bounds over the grass to him. “Whatcha sittin’ here for? You should’ve come over!”

“Didn’t want to interrupt. You looked like you were having fun.”

“He’s mental.” He says it with a brilliant, reverent grin that makes it sound like _he’s amazing_. Julian laughs drily.

“That’s probably the most accurate assessment of Rich Fulcher I’ve ever heard.” He glances over at the bench but it’s now empty; Rich has presumably gone looking for someone else to torment. “Still. It’s good that you’re getting on so well. Maybe you should write with him sometime too.”

It’s meant to be banter, superficially light and – if he’s honest – a little self-deprecating. But something else must have snuck in, because Noel looks genuinely puzzled for about half a second before his features rearrange themselves into a gentle, and disturbingly wise, look. He sits down beside Julian.

“Why would I do that?” he asks softly. “I’ve got you.”

Julian shrugs. “I’m nothing special.”

“’Course you are! I never met anyone like you.”

The smile on his face has got to be about a thousand watts, and Julian can’t quite manage to raise the eyebrow he was going to. He settles for a wan smile in return. It’s enough; Noel grins even harder, a million watts, a whole bloody sun. There’s a tiny dimple in his cheek. His eyes blaze huge and blue. It’s the same look Julian’s seen over so many cups of midnight tea, but he realises with a sudden start that, for all its familiarity, it’s never been directed at anyone but him. Up close like this, he sees it’s really nothing like the smile Noel gave Rich earlier. Nothing at all.


	2. 03 (June 2000) / 04 (April 2001)

_we were trying to prove our blood wrong_  
 _[june 2000]_  


Noel meets a girl at a pub in Liverpool who asks him out.

He and Julian have travelled up and down the country, writing, practicing, performing. They’ve done galas and solo shows, fill in spots for friends of friends. They’ve been to Edinburgh and Australia.

She’s standing by the bar and she beckons him over after the gig is finished, drink in one hand and a familiar smile on her face. It’s not until she uses her little finger to tuck the long strands of her fringe behind one ear that he realises he already knows her.

He and Julian have written hours worth of scenes and a short film. They’ve caught trains and buses and planes; they’ve fallen asleep with their heads on one another’s shoulders and lived in each other’s pockets. Julian has touched his elbows and wrists, his hair, the small of his back. His shoulder blades. Three weeks ago they walked off a stage holding hands.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the girl asks. She doesn’t stop smiling.

“No, I do.” He sits his Coke down on the bar next to her glass. “Sort of. Sorry, I’ve got a shit memory.”

“Dee.” She holds out her hand like a Renaissance lady waiting to be kissed.

“Oh! Yes,” he exclaims, taking her hand in both of his. “Delia. Like the flower.”

She laughs, a one-sided little snicker that somehow makes her look like a pixie. “That’s a dahlia.”

“Well, yeah, but they’re pink. You were wearing all pink the night I met you.”

“I thought you had a shitty memory.”

“I remember colours. I like colours.”

Dee tips her head to one side. “Yeah, I reckon you do.”

Noel draws patterns in the condensation on his glass as they talk. Dee has a red felt tip in her back pocket and friends who are waiting, and as she swallows the last of her drink, she uses it to write her number on the back of Noel’s hand.

“You should call me,” she says, slipping the pen back into her jeans.

“I…” Noel glances across the room to a little, crowded table. He thinks of Pete Sweet and his best mate Stitch. He thinks of Vince and Howard, and characters that mirror real life so blatantly it’s practically plagiarism. “There’s – someone.”

She doesn’t bother to follow his glance. “I know.” Her voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper, but it still rings in his ears like a shout. “But you don’t have to say no all the time. Just until he’s ready to say yes.”

“It wouldn’t be right.”

“Is it right for you to be lonely?” 

It’s a gentle question, curious rather than condescending. He responds with the same tone. 

“Who says I’m lonely?”

“I think you might be. Even if you don’t know it. I think you’ll always be lonely without him.”

Noel glances at her sharply. She meets his gaze without flinching, a five-foot-three elf in neon jeans and plastic bangles, with eyes that can apparently see straight through him. He looks away first, down to the water on his fingertips. “I’m giving him til I turn thirty,” he says with a rueful smile. “Then I’m asking him myself.”

Dee lays a hand on top of his. “Then I wish you all the luck in the world. But keep that anyway. In case you change your mind.”

She’s gone before he looks up. Noel watches her skip back to her friends. He watches as she’s swallowed into the group of taller, bigger bodies and disappears out the door. He looks back across the room to the table where Lee’s building something out of paper coasters and Julian’s flicking peanuts into the air, trying to catch them in his mouth.

He crosses the room and slips into their midst. Julian’s hand finds his knee within a minute of him sitting down, just as he’s starting an argument with Lee about the best way to build coaster towers. The fingers of his free hand drum on the table top, long and pale and oblivious.

Noel slips his phone quietly from his pocket and, before it has a chance to wear off, he types the number on the back of his hand into it. Then he tucks it away again and lets his hand drift down to sit next to Julian’s.

  


_i belong deeply to myself_  
 _[april 2001]_  


On the other side of the world, while his body clock is still shot to pieces, Julian realises two things that he thinks his entire circle of friends might have known for years.

The first is that Noel Fielding is at least fifty percent unicorn. 

Normal people look pale at night time; Noel looks ethereal. His eyes darken when the sun goes down, turning the same blue as the sea, and his skin is so white it’s practically luminescent. There are uneven streaks of red in his hair that have turned purple in the moonlight. He’s picking his way across the beach with his toes pointed like a ballerina and his arms spread wide at his sides. His fingers are splayed as if he’s balancing twenty feet above ground. He looks like he should have sparkling, glittering wings.

The second is that he's revoltingly in love with him, glittering wings or otherwise.

Julian’s always heard people talk about realisations hitting them, and scoffed inwardly at their melodrama. Realisations aren’t physical.

Except this one is.

He stops dead where he stands, watching Noel flit ever closer to the shoreline. The hand of knowledge is icy. He shivers in its grip as he’s dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the night he sat in his car in the freezing cold and said yes to an overeager boy who invited him in for tea. 

Maybe it’s all been inevitable since then, he thinks. Just a series of events he signed off on when he locked his car and followed Noel across the street. Or maybe it came later, after the tea, when –

He shakes his head hard before he can relive that memory again. He shakes off the cold, metaphorical claws holding him in place, and strides across the beach. Noel’s sitting cross-legged a few feet back from the high tide line, where the sand is still soft and white like sugar.

“’Bout time. What were you _doing_?”

“Nothing,” Julian mutters, wondering if there’s any way he can fold himself into a similar lotus position without getting sand down his trousers. Probably not. He drops down gingerly and settles for bending just the one leg instead, tucking his foot under the back of the opposite knee. The hand his weight’s resting on sinks a few inches into the sand. He pulls it out and shakes it at Noel. “This is ridiculous. We’re going to end up with half the beach back in the hotel room.”

“ _You’re_ ridiculous,” Noel says cheerfully, flicking at the grains of sand that have landed on him. “We’re on a _beach_ , Ju. A proper beach. And it’s warm. It’s autumn here and I’m in short sleeves! How genius is that?”

“Yeah, okay, you’ve got a point.”

“And there’s stars _everywhere_! I don’t even know half of them.” Noel uncrosses his legs, pushes up onto his knees and then sits back, geisha-style, looking up into the sky. “You never see this many in London.”

There’s a wistful note to his voice that pierces Julian right through. “Sometimes you can in Yorkshire,” he says softly, remembering the vague, dark nights from his childhood, when stars were still magic and not science. “On the three nights a year that it’s clear.”

Noel hums a little laugh but his eyes remain distant, staring upwards. “It’s not even really here, you know. All this light, it’s all from the past. It takes ages to get to earth.”

“Really?”

He nods. “Mmhmm. About four years for the closest ones, but most of these are older than that. Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty-five years.”

Julian takes a long look at the pale, pretty creature sitting next to him on the sand. “How do you even know this stuff?”

“I’m not thick, thanks very much. I watch Horizon!”

“So do I.”

“And Discovery.”

“You pay for Sky so you can watch Discovery?” Julian snorts. “I’d have had you down as MTV.”

Noel grins sheepishly. “Might watch that too.”

“And the balance of the universe is restored.” Julian’s eyes drift back up to the shining dark above him. “Alright then. What other fascinating astronomical trivia have you got in that head of yours?”

“Well. You can never see Draco or the Big Dipper from here. I checked to make sure. See that?” He points at a cluster hanging over the water. “That’s Leo. And Draco should be kind of there, but Australia’s too far from the North Pole for it to ever come up over the horizon.”

Noel shifts again, crossing his legs once more. All his fidgeting has brought him a couple of inches closer, and when he resumes speaking, he leans his head gently against Julian’s shoulder. 

“They burn cold, like liquid nitrogen, but they’re gas. Lots of hydrogen and helium. And little bits of carbon. They just burn and burn.” He stops for a moment and adds very quietly, “It’s sad really. All of them’ll burn themselves to death sooner or later. And we won’t even notice because they’re so far away.”

Julian looks up at the points of light above him, so high and cold. He imagines them hanging still in the air, burning up their cores as the planets revolve between them. He looks back at Noel, slumped against him, staring forlornly out to sea, and follows his gaze.

“Kind of nice though, in a way,” he says. “Even after they’re dead, their light keeps shining.”

He feels Noel’s head lift from his shoulder, feels the spaces between them change minutely as he watches moonlight spill and ripple over the blanket of wet navy. A faint breath of air drifts past his pulse point. Noel’s lips brush gently against his jaw, halfway between his chin and his ear.

Julian almost chokes. 

He swallows hard, twice, and counts to fifteen in his head before he feels brave enough to turn and look at him. Noel’s let his head fall back to rest on his shoulder, but it’s tilted upwards so he can see Julian out of the corner of his eye. There’s a small smile playing on his mouth.

“What was that for?” Julian manages to ask.

The smile becomes a grin. “Just ’cause?”

“You can’t kiss someone ‘just ’cause!’”

“Yeah, I can. You did it to me once.”

Half of Julian’s brain applauds because as far as timing goes, on a beach ten thousand miles from home under a sky full of stars is about the most perfect place imaginable to finally mention the kiss that’s been steadily consuming all the air between you for the last three years. The other half wrings its hands uselessly and makes a noise that sounds something like “mrrphle”.

“I…” 

Julian frowns when neither half of his brain suggests a way of finishing the sentence he’s begun and Noel’s laugh fills the silence instead. He swivels around so they’re facing each other properly, looking at Julian with eyes that are open and honest and shining with reflected starlight.

“You’re hopeless. I love you a bit.”

Julian’s mouth fills with ash and sawdust. He stares back helplessly, words tumbling and slipping through his head, creating and destroying a thousand possible futures. There is a moment in the midst of them. He feels it burn cold and bright like the dying stars above him but he has nothing with which to mark its passing, and Noel climbs to his feet with the smile still on his face. _And we won’t even notice._

“Come on, get up. I bet even the water’s warm.” 

Julian doesn’t get up. He sits in the sand, watching as light from a past they never saw falls unheedingly around them. Watching as Noel dances down to where the waves lap the edge of the shore with his purpley red hair and non-existent wings.


	3. 05 (September 2002) / 06 (May 2003)

_the women in my family die waiting_  
_[september 2002]_  


Noel is patient.

His friends scoff when he says this, and he supposes he deserves it because he does want _stuff_ right away. He’ll walk out into a freezing cold night because buying jelly tots can’t possibly wait til morning. He’s currently got two phone numbers because the three months before his old contract ended was three months too long. His flat is littered with books that have pristine covers and uncracked spines, and he probably won’t have the time in two lifetimes to read them all, but they were new and he wanted them. 

But they’re just stuff. Stuff’s not important. 

France is full of sun and fields carpeted in foreign lime green. This one is dotted with meadowsweet and buttercups, and there’s a cow gated off to one side, chewing, chewing, chewing. Noel sits on the fence and swings his legs, making lists of the things he wants in his head. _An exhibition. A proper Boosh show, for telly, one that’ll make people laugh til they cry. A lifetime doing what makes him happy, preferably with_ people _who make him happy, like Rich and Richard and Julian. Julian._

Important things are always people and dreams, and these are worth being patient for. He can wait forever for people and dreams.

High, shrill notes fill the air and he fumbles for the phones in his pocket. It’s the older one, which means he knows who it is already, but he looks at the screen anyway.

_JU MOB_

He grins and hits the answer button.

“Are you ever gonna learn my new number?” 

The phone spits and hisses at him.

“Ju? _Ju._ Wait - ” He pulls the phone away from his ear and looks at the screen again. The first little reception bar is blinking on and off. “I’ve got fuck all signal, hold on.”

“We’ve… fir… try it.”

“What? Try _what_? Oh, for - ” The phone goes dead in his ear. He scowls at it and starts walking out into the field. The notes pierce the air again.

“Sorry, it cut out. Try what?”

“Pilot.”

“Try a pilot?”

“No, you berk, a _pilot_.” He can practically hear the grin on Julian’s face. “We’ve got a pilot.”

“ _What_?” he shrieks into the phone, uncaring of the fact that he sounds like a girl, uncaring of the fact that it’s loud enough to startle the couple of birds that are pecking in the grass. His body’s filling up with bubbles. His head’s all light. “You’re taking the piss. No way!”

“Way. Steve called half an hour ago.”

“ _Julian_.”

“I know.” Julian sounds as dizzy as he feels, and Noel wants to dance, wants to twirl, wants to flap his arms and fly back to England and hug Julian until he squeezes the breath out of him. He spins in a circle for the sheer joy of it. 

“I’m coming home right now.” 

Julian laughs down the line. “Settle down. They don’t want it till January.”

“ _Right now_. We’re having a proper party and everything.” Noel’s cheeks are burning already but he refuses to stop smiling. He’s never going to stop smiling. 

“January, Noel. And it’s still raining here.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Really? That’s ridiculous.”

“Very. Sure you want to cut your French sun short?”

“ _No_. But I’m pretty sure I want to write.”

“Then write.”

“I can’t, not without you.” He’s started pacing around the field in idle circles, but as he speaks the words he stops suddenly, the idea bright and brilliant in his mind. “Come down here.”

“What?”

“Come to France!”

“I can’t just come to France.”

“Sure you can! Oh come on, there’s loads of room, the whole house is empty. Please Ju, it’ll be great. We can write in the sun, you’ll love it. And there’s pastry shops _everywhere_.”

“And? You’re the one of us who eats cake all day.”

“ _Please_?” There’s a soft sigh on the other end of the line, and Noel knows instinctively what it means. The bubbles fizz up through him again and he can’t help himself; a happy squeal works its way out of his mouth as he jumps up and down, clutching the phone to his ear. “You are, aren’t you? Please say you are!”

“I’ll look into it. I might not be able to get there.”

“’Course you will, there’s loads of trains. It’ll be so genius, Ju! You’ll _love_ it here.”

“So you keep saying.” His voice is dry, but it still sounds like he’s smiling. “Go on then. Go buy a month’s worth of cakes and cheese, and I’ll call you back once I’ve sorted something out.”

“You’re the best.”

“I know. I’ll talk to you in a bit.”

“Bye!”

The phone goes dead again. Noel slips it back into his pocket and looks up at the sky. It’s shockingly blue and dotted with slow-moving cotton clouds. The sun is the same colour as the buttercups at his feet. “We’ve got a pilot,” he tells the sky, smiling under its beatific warmth. “We’ve got a pilot,” he says to the red and yellow ladybirds flitting in and out of the long grass. The cow in the corner has put its head over the fence and is chewing, chewing, chewing. “We’ve got a pilot,” he says to it, and there are so many bubbles filling his head he thinks it might burst. 

The cow blinks slowly and flicks its tail. The cow chews and watches him, and its heavy-lidded eyes say ‘ _Maybe. But it won’t go to series._ ’

“As if you know anything,” Noel says. “Alright, maybe it won’t this time. But it will one day. You’ll see.”

The cow keeps chewing. He turns his back on it and crosses the field again, plucking sunshine yellow flowers as he goes. They have a pilot, and Julian is coming to France, and Noel is patient.

  


_you hate women, just like your father and his father_  
_[may 2003]_  


They meet the January deadline. Days pass, then weeks pass. March becomes April, and by the time they hear anything at all, they’ve watched their final cut long ago. They’ve celebrated, fretted and forgotten.

Julian receives a phone call on a sunny, innocuous Friday afternoon. Steve tells him in a sunny, innocuous voice that the pilot will be airing two Tuesdays from now. He calls Noel immediately, who says he knows, and yes, it’s perfect timing, and no, he absolutely refuses to watch it again, with anyone, ever. Julian points out that it’s _perfect_ timing, he’s not anyone, and he can make sure no one else is home.

On the night before Noel’s birthday, he finds himself vacuuming the sofa and wonders if perhaps Noel didn’t have the right idea after all.

He casts an eye over his flat. It was already clean; now it’s spotless. The wall-clock above the television announces that he has actual hours until Noel gets here with its pointy black hands. He wonders how he’s going to fill them without disintegrating into a pile of overwrought nerves.

He’s kept his promise. No one else is home, and no one else is likely to be until tomorrow at the earliest. They celebrated Noel’s birthday at the weekend with everyone they know (he’s pretty sure the headache currently pressing in at his temples is at least a quarter hangover, still) and Noel lost no time in telling them all in his loudest voice that he was definitely _not_ suffering through watching that again and they could all get stuffed, he’d be spending Tuesday night with his head under his pillows. Julian had thought for a second that he’d changed his mind and been about to protest when Noel had squeezed his forearm, glanced up at him sideways through his long black lashes and smiled.

He’s fairly certain he didn’t blush. Grown men from Yorkshire don’t blush. But he excused himself for a cigarette just the same. 

Julian picks up one the cushions from the stack on the coffee table and plumps it slightly before placing it back in a corner of the sofa. He does the same with the remaining three. They look too perfect, so he takes them all off again, squashes them down a bit and tosses them back in their places.

One is rumpled, so he plumps it again.

There’s a knock at the door. His whole body starts and the cushion falls to the floor. He swears under his breath at whoever is out there and tries to ignore the fact that his heart’s attempting to perform an African tribal dance.

Noel ducks under his arm when he opens the door, flinging himself onto the sofa in a tangle of skinny limbs and misery.

“I can’t do this,” he says, crossing his legs underneath him and piling two of the cushions onto his lap. He buries his face in a third.

“I thought you weren’t - ”

“I _know_ ,” Noel moans into the stuffed square of cotton. He lifts his head, staring up with mournful eyes. “But I couldn’t stand the waiting. People keep calling to ask about tonight and it’s driving me mental. How much longer?”

Julian makes a show of checking his watch. “Two hours.”

“I’m going to die.” Noel presses his face back into the cushion, but after a moment he turns it sideways, peering at the vacuum cleaner. “Ju, are you _cleaning_?”

Julian shrugs. “My turn, innit. It’s easier to do when everyone’s out. No one to complain about the noise.”

It’s a plausible excuse. Good, even. He could almost convince himself with it, he thinks. _Easier when everyone’s out. It has nothing to do with anyone coming round later._

His brain studies the person who’s meant to be coming round later, _much_ later, after the cleaning is done and the evidence is buried, and refuses to buy it.

Noel pushes the cushions off his lap. “Can I help?”

“You must be joking.”

“I can’t just sit here!” His fingers stray to the hem of his t-shirt, plucking absently. “I can’t do this. It’s going to be awful, I know it is. I hate watching myself.”

“You do not. You watch yourself in the mirror all the time.”

“That’s different!” He chews on his bottom lip and mumbles the next words to his lap. “Other people can see this. What if they hate it?”

“They won’t,” Julian says, summoning a confidence he doesn’t feel.

“Oh god, what if _no one_ watches? That’d be worse!”

“They will.” Julian picks up the cushions again, sets them straight again, and plants his feet firmly in front of Noel. “They’ll watch it. They’ll like it. It’s your birthday tomorrow, and tonight the entire bloody country will watch you on tv. They’ll laugh and they’ll love Vince, and you’ll get to spend the next ten years telling everyone that you got a telly show for your thirtieth and it was well genius.”

He affects Noel’s intonation on the last few words and Noel looks up at him again. His eyes are still wide, like a lost puppy, but their usual glimmer is creeping back. “Really?”

“Really. If you must do something, make the tea. I’m done here anyway.”

Noel jumps up and heads for the kitchen. By the time Julian’s got the vacuum and j-cloths and bottles of spray put away, there’s a pot and two cups on the coffee table, alongside the cheeses from the fridge, a plate of chocolate biscuits and a bowl full of crisps he didn’t even know they had. Noel cringes when he turns the television on, but after the second cup of tea his eyes stop flicking to the screen every other second and his fingers stop digging into the arm rest.

Without warning, a familiar head full of messy red and blonde highlights appears. Noel squawks and scrambles as close to Julian as he can possibly get without sitting in his lap, tucking his feet up beside him. The cushion is back in front of his face.

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” Julian says, tugging at the corner of the cushion as his on-screen self tells Noel to get in his O.

Noel just moans and holds it tighter.

Julian finds himself watching Noel as much as he watches the television. When Rich and Richard and Mike come on, Noel peeks up over the top of the cushion and laughs quietly to himself. After ten minutes he forgets to start ducking back down and just sits there with slightly drawn brows, cushion tucked under his chin. 

On the screen, Howard rests his arm on Vince’s shoulder and proclaims a quest to find the Egg of Mantumbi. Noel sinks down in his seat a little and slips his hand into the crook of Julian’s elbow. On the screen, Vince peeps over Howards’s shoulder, wrapped in an oversized fur coat; beside him, Noel leans his head against the same shoulder and watches with one eye. 

The inevitable capture scene arrives, and Julian hears his own voice say _I love you, Vince_.

Noel’s fingers tighten ever so slightly around his arm. Vince’s breathy giggle fills his ears. Noel’s voice says _I do! I love you_ , and Julian feels his heart start to thump again in frantic, shaky beats.

He tells himself to calm down. He tells himself he’s being ridiculous. 

Julian knows about love. He’s known about it his whole life. He’s heard his parents' story and his grandparents’ story. Love is a few children and a picket fence, a steady job and evenings of home-cooked meals. It’s a small, tidy house in a respectable suburb. 

Noel stops looking at the screen and looks up at him instead. The cushion is clutched tight against his chest. 

Julian forces himself to speak. “What?”

“Nothing.” He doesn’t drop his gaze.

Love is for better or worse, in sickness and health. It isn’t a pointy-nosed southerner with badly dyed hair. “ _What_?”

“Just… are you ever gonna kiss me properly? Because it’s almost my birthday and there’s no one here but us, and it’s been five fucking years, Ju. I don’t mind waiting five years for a series. But if I have to wait another five years for you, I -”

The body that melts under his touch isn’t respectable. It doesn’t have a picket fence or a steady job. He doesn’t think it can cook particularly well. But it clings to him like a vow and it promises forever with hands and lips and tongue, and Julian returns its promises with his own as their faces fade to black on a forgotten television screen.


	4. 07 (December 2003) / 08 (January 2004)

_i didn’t want to fail at love like our parents_  
 _[december 2003]_  


Noel waits until the dishes are cleared, until there’s been tea and music and conversation, until Mike’s gone home and his dad has disappeared upstairs. They’re night creatures, him and his mum. Things are easier for them in the starlight.

He’s never been able to hide from either of his parents, but it’s his mum who has the sharpest eyes. She brings two mugs of tea into the dimly-lit room, even though he hasn’t asked for one, and he knows then and there that she’ll have it out of him, everything he doesn’t know how to say, before he goes home.

Noel unfurls from the corner of the sofa he’s folded himself into and takes the mug his mum’s holding out. She sits down beside him.

“What’s wrong, plum?”

He threads his fingers through the mug’s handle, studying the way his fingertips interlock. There’s no point in saying ‘nothing’. “You and dad, when you met. Were you… I mean, did you know he was…”

“The one?”

“No.” He frowns. “No, not _the_ one, that’s destiny. Destiny’s a nightmare. If there’s only one person for anyone, how do you ever find them? But… _a_ one, maybe. Like a soulmate? Someone who matches you in all the ways that matter – there’s got to be more than one of them, right? There’s six billion of us, there has to be more than one.”

He’s used too many words again. He always uses too many words, but his mum knows how to sift through them properly. “I think so,” she says, sipping at her tea.

“How?”

“I don’t know. I just did. Your nan hated him at first, but I knew he was mine. I could feel it.”

“But that’s not enough.” His fingers tighten around the mug. “What if you felt wrong? What if you just thought they were right for you but they weren’t? Or what if… what if you didn’t realise they were right, but they were, and nothing ever happened between you? What then?”

His mum sits her tea on the coffee table and sighs. “This isn’t about Delia, is it?”

“No. Yes.” Noel sits his own untouched mug on the little table beside the sofa, under the big old lamp. His throat’s constricting and his hands are clammy, and he’s beginning to wish he’d just gone home because there’ll never be enough stars in the sky for this to be easy. “Kind of, yeah.”

“You love her.” It’s not a question, but he answers it anyway.

“Yes. _Yes_ , she’s wonderful. Dee’s… she’s just like me, and we match.” The tightness in his throat is getting worse. “Yes, I love her,” he whispers, closing his eyes.

“But?”

“I don’t know. I… she’s not everything.” His eyes are starting to prickle and he opens them again, as wide as he can, hoping that maybe it’ll stop the moisture pooling. “She’s so much. She’s honest, and kind, and everything about her is amazing, but she isn’t _everything_. Because she’s just like me. And I think…” 

He stops, drawing in a deep breath. Looking for the right words in the thousand he knows. His nose is all stuffy like he has a cold, and every time he blinks, little droplets go spilling over his eyelashes. He bites on his bottom lip and ignores them. “I think there might be someone who is everything,” he says, hating the way his voice cracks. “But I don’t know how to tell, because if it’s just a feeling, it’s not something you can ever know for sure, and you might be wrong and _how do you know_?”

It’s hopeless trying to ignore his runny nose and the tears burning on his cheeks. Noel gives up, brushing at them furiously with both hands. There’s a dull, aching pain in his sternum, and he pulls his feet up onto the sofa, wrapping his arms around his knees so he can hide his face in them. His mother’s fingers stroke gently over the top of his head.

“You just do, plum. You know because they fit. You know because life will get in your way and they’ll still be there. It’ll pull the two of you apart, over and over, but it’ll never break what makes you _you_. And you’ll keep finding your way back to each other, always. You’d be able to even if you were blind-folded and sent to opposite sides of the earth.”

He laughs, a shaky, wet, sobbing laugh that makes the tears pool faster in his eyes. He looks up at his mother, blinking them away, and asks the only question he really wanted to.

“How do I tell _him_ that?”

She wraps her arm around his waist. Noel folds his legs underneath him and leans his head on her shoulder. 

“Darling, you don’t need to,” she says, smoothing his hair down the way she did when he was little. “If he’s your everything, he already knows.”

  


_my dad walked out one afternoon and never came back_  
 _[january 2004]_  


Noel’s sitting by himself on Naboo’s little sofa with his legs tucked up so that his chin’s resting on his knees. Almost everyone’s gone now, and without the big studio floodlights the sets look small and lifeless. This one’s yet to be properly packed up; the props they use as shaman paraphernalia are still littered around like colourful leaves. Noel’s hand dangles over the arm of the sofa, toying with the lid of an orange teapot.

“Alright?” he asks, but he doesn’t look up and his voice sounds flat in the silence.

“Yeah. You?”

“Yeah. Just thinking.”

Julian steps around the small, pointy coffee table in front of him and sits down. Noel tucks his legs in tighter, as if he thinks he needs to make room.

“You’re fine,” Julian says. His hand reaches out automatically to pat Noel’s knee but with the way he’s sitting, his fingers just graze his boots. Julian squeezes his hand around the toe of the scuffed leather because he knows Noel will hate it, and sure enough he looks up, nose wrinkled.

“Get off.” He grins when Julian raises an eyebrow at him.

“What y’thinking about?”

The moment of levity slides back into still, silent dark. “Nothing much. Gary Numan. What we’re gonna do with the next season. Bryan Ferry.” There’s a long, dark silence before he speaks again. “What were your parents like, growing up?”

It’s not the question that’s troubling; Julian’s so used to Noel’s penchant for non sequitur he rarely notices their subject changes these days. It’s the way he asks it, the tiny high squeaks that creep into his voice. It’s the way Noel’s arm snakes back in close to his body, like he’s trying to hug himself. The way his fingers replace the teapot lid with the fringe of the white scarf he’s still got wrapped around his neck.

“Alright,” Julian says cautiously. “Normal, I guess. My dad went to work, my mum kept his house neat. We had dinner at seven o’clock sharp. I was in bed by nine on a school night. Trips to my grandparents’ once a month and church on Sundays.”

“Yeah. We never did church on Sundays.”

There’s a strange, almost wistful tone to his voice that’s ten kinds of wrong. Noel’s told him about his childhood before, always bright-eyed and hyperactive, hands flailing about the place as he recounts the dinners he didn’t have to sit at the table for, or the weekends he wandered around London on his own, just _looking_ , like a kid in the best kind of adventure book. Now he’s frowning down over his lap, braiding and unbraiding the fringing on his scarf. Julian shifts an inch closer and slips his arm around the back of Noel’s skinny shoulders.

“What’s up?”

Noel wrinkles his nose again and tugs his bottom lip between his teeth. “What if they’d left?” he says, the words tumbling out together in a rush. “Like Bryan Ferry. They were so young when they had me, and… what if they’d just got bored and left?”

“Noel - ”

“I used to stay with my nan,” he says, so softly it’s almost a whisper. “When they went out. And I’d cry whenever they took me round there because I knew it meant they’d leave. They’d have to sneak out one at a time while I was distracted but I always knew sooner or later I’d look up and find them gone.”

Noel turns his head to face Julian. There are fretful creases across his forehead. The t-shirt he’s wearing makes his eyes even more blue than usual, a sharp, painful blue that looks at Julian like it’s looking for answers.

Julian wonders how he’s supposed to give him one when he doesn’t even know what the question is. 

He wraps his arm a little tighter, pulling Noel in toward him. “They always came back though, didn’t they?”

“But what if they hadn’t?” Noel’s voice is full of cracks and jagged, hysterical breaths. “I don’t want that, Ju, I don’t want someone who can just slip away like that. I want – my dad, he loves my mum. He _loves_ her. He still brings her flowers for no reason. They’d dance in the kitchen when I was little, until they both fell over laughing. I want that. I want someone who’ll fight me and fight for me, someone who’ll never be able to leave without me noticing. Someone who burns and burns.”

“Like a yellow Roman candle,” Julian says, without thinking, and Noel laughs in his arms.

“Yes. _Yes_. I want a mad love.” 

“You never cease to amaze me. I didn’t know you’d read Kerouac.”

“’Course I have. I was raised by Kerouac.” 

It never rains for long in the sunshine kid’s world. The blue of Noel’s eyes is lighter already. The creases in his forehead have smoothed themselves out. Julian keeps his arm around him anyway. 

“Of course you were.” He waits for half a minute. Noel says nothing and he waits half a minute more, just in case, before he asks, “You going to tell me what this is all about then?”

Noel shrugs. In silence, he lets his feet drop back down to the floor and squirms under Julian’s arm. His heels echo where they hit the wooden boards. Julian feels the warm pressure of fingers gliding across his belly.

“Howard left Vince.”

“Sorry? Vince left Howard!”

“Nah, he didn’t, not really.” Noel glances up at him through his eyelashes. “He was waiting back there in the forest. He thought Howard was gonna come back for him.”

The cracks are working their way back into Noel’s words. Julian twists around so that Noel’s hand slips even further across his stomach and says softly, “I’m not Howard.”

“No, but - ”

“ _I’m not Howard._ ” He tilts Noel’s face up with his free hand. “I’m not going to leave. Not at the end of this series, not at the end of the next one. Alright? Wherever you are, with your whole mad swirl of everything, I’ll be there. Right at the centre of it, shambling along.”

Noel pulls away and looks down at his lap. A small, pleased smile crinkles its way onto his face. “How come you know Kerouac? He’s a bit mad for you, ain’t he?”

Julian pulls Noel in against him once more, running his fingers through his messy tendrils of calico fringe. “No. They’re the only ones for me, the mad ones.”


	5. 09 (July 2004) / 10 (June 2005)

_i didn’t call him back because he likes his girls voiceless_  
 _[july 2004]_  


Noel always wakes early in France. 

It doesn’t matter what time he goes to bed. It doesn’t matter how little sleep he’s had, whether he’s alone or with a group of friends. He wakes up unaided, every morning, before eight o’clock.

He never does anything particularly useful; France or not, he still finds any time before lunch mildly detestable. But it’s easier to get out of bed here, so he creeps into the cottage’s cheerful little kitchen, makes a cup of tea, and sits in the puddles of sunlight for an hour or so while his brain wakes up.

The light in France is different. The angle is higher, the latitude lower and by the time he gets into the bathroom, it’s usually streaming through the slatted blinds in thick rays. He likes to crack them open a quarter of an inch, because the light that tumbles in makes chains of rainbows in the spray from the shower.

This morning he turns the water on as hot as he dares and lets it pour over him from head to toe. His entire body aches. There are thumb-shaped bruises on his biceps; he peers over the back of his shoulder and sees corresponding finger bruises adorning the other side. The water burns deliciously, pinking his skin and soothing his pains.

He can still feel Julian pressing him down.

If he’d had to guess, he’d have said Julian liked sex noisy. He’s so quiet all the time, and they say that, whoever they are, that you have to watch out for the quiet ones. But it’s just the opposite; he seems to get quieter every time, soaking up all Noel’s whimpery moans and gasping, wordless breaths, leaving nothing between them but silence.

Noel lifts his head into the spray. It runs down his back in rivulets, burning along the same paths Julian traced with his tongue not six hours ago. He can feel the cool cotton pillow case against his face. He can feel the press of Julian’s knees between his thighs. He can feel the hands splayed underneath his shoulder blades, the fingertips dragging down the length of his back.

He turns towards the sun. He remembers Julian turning him, tugging him over until they were face to face, nose tip to nose tip, nothing between them but silence. The light streams through the window, and Noel stretches his fingers wide, the way he stretched them over Julian’s ribcage in the early morning moonlight. The water runs down his arms and falls from the tips of his fingers, sparkling in the sun. It looks like magic, he thinks. Like he’s conjuring diamonds from the air. He moves his fingers as if he’s playing the piano and the diamonds fall in showers of light.

His memory is normally fleeting but this morning it’s so vivid it’s almost physical. Noel leans back against the cold tiled walls, letting the spray stream down in front of him. He remembers the heat of Julian’s breath against his neck. He remembers the stutter of teeth against his skin as Julian pushed deeper, _deeper_ , and it’s so strong, so real it makes his heart hurt and his cock twitch.

Sometimes Noel wonders if he shouldn’t feel guiltier. Everyone knows they’re away writing, but no one has any idea where in the world they are. No one has any idea how much writing they’re actually doing. There are days when he thinks he should stop, that it would be better. Nobler. But he remembers what Dee whispered to him so many years ago, and he remembers the satisfied grin on her face when Julian kissed him at New Year. When he tries to imagine walking away, all he can picture is blackness.

He turns again, bowing his head this time, and fumbles past the bottles of shampoo lined up on the little shower ledge for his own. As he works it into his hair, a voice interrupts the gentle thud of water on tile. 

“What are you doing up?”

Cool hands slip around him. Their thumbs brush over the bones of his hips. “Hey, Ju,” he breathes, twisting in his arms. He rubs the water from his eyes. Julian never looks tired in the mornings, just warm and brown and comfortable.

“Hey yourself,” he says. His eyes travel down Noel’s body. “I see you missed me.”

Noel feels the blush in his cheeks instantly. He follows Julian’s gaze and sees himself, suddenly hard and ready, flushed ten different shades of pink all down his body from the heat of the water. Julian crooks a finger and lifts his chin with one hand, staring shamelessly into Noel’s eyes as he wraps the other hand around the base of his cock. 

Noel’s breath catches in his throat. The wall is cold at his back and Julian’s hand is hot on his skin. His eyelids flutter shut and he forces them back open, keeping his eyes locked on Julian’s. “I see you didn’t,” he says, and dips his mouth to graze his teeth along Julian’s index finger.

“I just woke up, you tart. Give me a minute.” Julian’s grip loosens and his hand moves up instead, up, up, sliding over Noel’s wet stomach. His fingernails scrape thin ruby paths through the fields of pink. They reach his abdomen, his chest, the hollow of his clavicle. Julian traces the shape of it, replaces fingers with mouth, and Noel can’t keep his eyes open any longer. He tips his head back, imagining the bloom of red at his throat, a poppy in the shape of Julian’s lips. Julian sucks once, hard. His teeth scrape Noel’s skin. Noel writhes under his touch, mewling fretful little whimpers that only get louder when the sensation vanishes.

A hand fumbles behind his hip. The noise of the water softens and softens and finally stops, and when Noel opens his eyes again, Julian’s face is two inches from his own. He’s standing utterly still, hands flat against the wall on either side of Noel’s head. The shower is full of their breathing and the silent misty steam.

“Fucking hell, Ju,” he whispers.

“Fucking you, actually.”

Julian’s hands slip to his hips, pushing him back solidly against the tiles. Julian’s mouth finds his, hot and wet and entirely too brief. It moves down, down through the flushes of pink and white, along the red ruby paths, down over his hipbones. Noel’s heart hammers in his chest, smashing the silence that surrounds them. Julian’s lips slip over the tip of him and Noel screws his eyes shut, tangling his fingers in Julian’s hair and conjuring diamonds in the blackness.

  


_i couldn’t love you, you were a small war_  
 _[june 2005]_  


“Aww, I love this one!”

“You love them all,” Julian says drily. Noel tugs on his hand.

“But I _really_ love this one. Come on, Ju, come dance.”

There’s no point saying no; Noel will just pout like a petulant child until he says yes. Julian rolls his eyes heavenward and allows himself to be dragged out into the middle of the room.

Normally when Noel says ‘dance’, he means something along the lines of ‘stick your hands in the air and shake your hips like a girl’. Tonight’s no exception, but this song’s slower than anything so far; he moves slowly, hypnotically, like a willow in the wind. His arms work their way up Julian’s sides to twine around his neck. He’s humming to himself, eyes closed, marking each gentle, electronic pulse with his head.

“D’you reckon we could do that?” he murmurs against the shell of Julian’s ear. 

“Do what?”

“Run. Run and run tonight.”

Julian disentangles himself from the vines of Noel’s arms. “Run where?”

“Anywhere.”

He sounds so earnest that Julian can’t help laughing. 

“Don’t laugh! I’m serious.” Noel’s bottom lip works its way out into the pout he was denied earlier. His eyes shine unholy blue fire in the darkness. “Let’s just go.”

“Go _where_?” Julian asks again, because he knows he’s expected to.

“I don’t know! You choose. Somewhere where no one knows our names. Where it can just be us again. We can write like we used to, wherever we want. _Whenever_ we want. Cafés in the middle of the night, and no one would bother us ‘cos they wouldn’t know who we are.”

“You’d be bored senseless after two weeks without an audience.”

“I wouldn’t,” Noel says, too quickly. He glances downwards at his feet briefly, scuffing the toe of one boot against the other. A rueful look creeps onto his face. “Alright, maybe a little bit.”

“A lotta bit.”

“We could come back every so often though? Sneak in in the night, like ninjas, do a show and then sneak back out again. That’d be genius.”

“That’d be mental.”

“Would not. Come on Ju, think about it! We could -”

“ _You_ could stop talking for a minute while I get another drink. I think I’m going to need it.”

“Get me one,” Noel calls after him as he slips away, and he nods without looking back. His mind’s turning Noel’s words over already, poking and probing at them, trying to work out if they’re something more than one of his midnight flights of fancy.

An elbow nudges his side while he waits for the barman to pour their drinks. He turns to see Julia Davis, smiling broadly beside him.

“Hello, stranger.”

“Hello yourself. Didn’t know you were around.”

“I’ve not long got here. Saw Noel first, of course.” She motions to the crowd behind them. “He’s a party all on his own.”

Julian follows her gaze. Noel’s still dancing, head tipped back, eyes closed, twirling in slow circles as the beat goes on and on. He’s surrounded by people Julian barely knows. They’re all dark next to him; dark jeans, dark jackets. Dark moths hovering on the edges of Noel’s bright flame, as though they’ll be the one to bask in his light without being scorched to death.

Julian’s been circling Noel for years and even he still burns for hours after they part.

“He’s a _war_ ,” he says, dragging his eyes back to Julia. “You should see the dressing room.”

“I bet.” 

“ _Julia_!” Another woman, whose face he thinks he might recognise, bursts out of the crowd to wrap Julia in a fierce hug. “When did you get here?”

“About ten minutes ago,” Julia laughs, sending a look of apology in Julian’s direction. He waves it away with a small smile.

“You’re obviously wanted. Anyway, I need to get this back to Our Lady of the Dancefloor. I’ll catch you after.”

He picks up the drinks, plucking his way through the lines of people and back to Noel, wondering again how serious he was. 

Noel beckons, ten feet from him. His hair’s plastered to his forehead. The black denim moths are still surrounding him and as Julian sets their drinks on the table, he’s seized with the idea of saying yes. He’ll walk those ten feet and say yes, slipping his arms around Noel’s skinny waist and then they’ll run so far and so fast together. 

And he almost does. He walks out into the crowd. His hands reach out, settle on Noel’s waist, and the last chords of the song die away. The air is filled with a new one, bright and loud.

“Oh, excellent, I love this one!” Noel shouts, grinning like a fiend. He spins away, dancing among the dark strangers like a mote of sunlight. Julian watches him for a moment before he walks back to the table.

This isn’t the right song for yes. There will be another, later, a soft and quiet song. He’ll walk the ten feet. He’ll tell him then.


	6. 11 (February 2006) / 12 (March 2006)

_i’m lonely so i do lonely things_  
 _[february 2006]_  


There’s always a drink, these days. 

He never has to pay for them. People hand him brightly coloured glasses with cherries and umbrellas, or dark muted drinks that taste like adulthood. Sometimes he remembers how to say no but they always try again, these eager hands. 

Tonight the glass is a triangle, its contents the orange of a dying sun. He waits for Julian to tell him not to, but Julian is halfway to drunk already, staring pensively into the whiskey that Noel always ends up kissing from his lips sooner or later. He swirls the remains of it around the heavy-bottomed glass and Noel takes the complimentary sunset with a flashing smile.

There’s always a drug somewhere. They used to need to look for them; they used to be innocent little things, pink and white, more caffeine than anything else. Now they’re passed around like sweets and if you line them up they make a rainbow. 

Tonight the pill is purple, nearly black in the dark little corner they’re nestled in. It leaves trails of sugar on Noel’s tongue and shows him supernovas. Tonight Julian’s beside him. He can feel his outline but he looks around reflexively anyway, pressing his fingers to the glow of his jaw. The shadows between their skin hum with creation.

Noel thinks about all the stars they’ve sat under and the stardust that makes up his bones. He thinks about the stardust that made Julian and wonders how much of it has been passed back and forth between them. How much of it has been stolen by strangers’ drinks, by their hot, pressing hands? Julian’s often got other hands on him these days. But Noel’s own hand is on him now, resting lightly against his thigh, and it sings with the contact, conducted by an orchestra of pulsing nebulae.

He misses the tiny spaces. These bars are big. The stages are bigger. He’s drifting above them now, unmindful of gravity. He can see them all, each one swamped with crowds and noise and people, arms and hands and drinks that fill the voids between him and Julian, forcing them apart. He misses the world that fitted close to them, where the spaces were their own, when he felt huge in his living room and small in Julian’s arms. He misses the universe he drew with glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of their oldest flat.

Julian’s eyelids have drifted to half-mast. His head is tipped back, just so, and there’s a phantom smile breezing across his face, a moon of serenity in the chaotic cosmos that’s swallowing them. 

Noel is floating. He could catch a moon, if he tried. 

He pulls himself up into Julian’s lap, planting one knee either side of his hips, tethering himself to the world he knows and the moon that lights it. Julian’s eyes flutter open again. His smile becomes a smirk. His hands slip up, over Noel’s hips, over his waist, until his fingers are fitted into the gaps between Noel’s vertebrae. That should be enough, Noel thinks. They should be locked together, but he just keeps floating, up and on, above the moon and the stars and the cold, dark sky. A sickly, panicky thought squirms into his mind: he’s lost. He’s drifting through space and Julian has no idea that all he’s holding is a shell. 

Julian’s eyes have fallen shut again and he’s leaning forward, nose buried in the space where Noel’s ribs begin to separate. Noel listens to his heart beat at the furthest edges of the universe and wonders why Julian can’t hear that he’s empty.

He stares hard into the stars surrounding them, trying to find himself. There are so many of them in the darkness. A prick of light for every person that pressed against him, a constellation for every hand that’s offered him oblivion. He is infinitesimal against this crowd, and even with Julian’s touch to steer him, he has no idea where to start looking.

  


_he sent me a text that said ‘i love you so bad’_  
 _[march 2006]_  


Julian finds Noel in the sitting room, folded into the oldest armchair with his knees tucked up against his chest. There’s a book resting under his elbow, and the television’s on but he’s looking through it rather than at it. Julian sinks down onto the seat of the sofa that’s closest to him.

“Halfway. I just counted. It’s all downhill from here.”

“Mmm.” 

Noel’s eyes don’t move, don’t even flicker towards him. Julian closes his own for a moment, counting his breaths. Noel’s been in a strop all day, closed off and cold; he’s kept a foot between them and his hands to himself, and while it might have been a blessed reprieve this morning while he was hungover and under-caffeinated, now it’s just downright weird. Julian can practically feel Noel’s irritation rippling around him, eating up the spaces that his hands normally occupy. It’s making his skin crawl.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong then?”

“Nuffin’.” And he knows it’s something, because Noel’s emphasised the f’s to a ridiculous degree, like he used to do when no one knew who they were.

“Come off it.” Without thinking, he lays a hand on Noel’s forearm. He knows it for a mistake immediately. Noel’s a rubbish poker player, and Julian’s had almost a decade to learn his tells. He chews at his thumbnail when he wants affection, and tugs at his hems when he wants reassurance. When he reads, it’s spread out on the floor on his stomach, feet kicking up behind him. Even at his most tense, he’ll relax into Julian’s touch.

The arm Julian’s hand rests on now emanates hostility, screaming _no_ even as his own fingertips rejoice _yes_ at the normality of contact.

Julian draws his hand back slowly. He watches for the signs to proceed: the flick of Noel’s thumbnail against the pad of his forefinger, or a long huffy breath.

Noel grits his teeth and stares harder at the television.

_Gentle, Julian. Gentle._

“Okay, have it your way,” he says softly. “But we’ve got almost two full days off, yeah? And we’ve got a proper house to stay in, so maybe you could… I don’t know, look like you’re enjoying it a bit?”

The snort he’s expecting doesn’t come. Noel’s eyes flick to his, dangerously bright. “And maybe you could answer your fucking text messages,” he snaps. In the ten seconds it takes Julian to process the sentence, Noel’s unfolded his limbs, stalked from the room and through the conservatory, and slipped out into the yard to join Mike, Rich and Dave.

Julian sits for a moment, mouth hanging slightly open as if that’s all he’ll need for a response to form. It doesn’t work. Shaking his head, he gets heavily to his feet. He’s beginning to regret not staying at the hotel after all. His parents are away and his mother insisted they use the house, that there’d be enough spare beds. _Have a proper cooked meal and a decent night’s rest while you can_ , she said, but so far all they’ve done is spend an entire night in various pubs, and someone has found time to completely trash the kitchen. Rich, probably, if the sticky, jammy toast crusts everywhere are any indication, though how he’s managed it when he and Dave spent the remains of the night at Dave’s friend’s place is anybody’s guess.

Julian starts tidying up the strewn plates into piles, sets them beside the sink, flicks the switch on the kettle. His phone’s sitting behind it, and he remembers drunkenly attempting to make tea at arse o’clock this morning, after Noel and Mike had collapsed in the spare room. His mobile had been buzzing incessantly, and he’d spent a good ten minutes peering at the jumbled pixel letters before giving it up as a lost cause and clambering up the stairs to bed.

He opens up his message folder, and sure enough, Noel’s name is at the top of the list. He scrolls back through. It doesn’t make much more sense than it did last night; there’s an assortment of misspelled words and that awful shorthand Noel only uses when he’s drunk because “it’s quicker”.

       
_Ur beds well comfy!!_   


       
_U think this is wot sleepin on marshmellows is like?_   


       
_Lol mike sounds like a snargle_   


Julian snorts, wondering which of Noel’s imaginary monsters a snargle might be and if he’ll be forced to put it in the show.

       
_Hey I had an idea_   


       
_Ju_   


       
_JU!!_   


       
_How long does it take 2 make tea 4 fucks sake my eyes r all heavy hurry up_   


       
_Woteva tell u in da morn_   


       
_Night juilu x_   


“Can’t even spell my bloody name,” Julian mutters under his breath. He frowns at the screen, wondering why a handful of ridiculous messages has prompted the first tantrum he’s seen all tour. There’s nothing in there that could possibly cause offence, and anyway, Noel’s only gotten huffy about a text message once before, years ago.

_You never answered me!_

_You were drunk, you berk!_

_So? Doesn’t mean I didn’t mean it._

Noel’s a rubbish poker player. His fingers will always seek out Julian’s, and he never sits alone unless he’s hurting. Julian’s eyes work their way over the last message again, carefully, re-translating it into English as they go.

       
_Night Ju, I love you x_   


“You absolute tit,” he says out loud, wandering back into the living room. Noel’s still outside, despite the fact that it’s blowing a gale and he hates the cold, but there’s a ninety percent chance his phone is wedged into his jeans. Julian’s thumbs work the buttons of his own.

       
_Love you too, idiot. Learn to spell._   


He looks up in time to see Noel jump slightly and fumble at his pocket. His phone beeps two seconds later.

       
_Prick_   


Julian grins.

       
_Wanker._   


Noel looks around and Julian pushes the curtain aside, raising an eyebrow at him. He raises one back. The corners of his mouth quirk slightly. 

       
_Come back inside. You’ll freeze your pretty tits off out there._   


Noel pulls a face and gives him the finger, but he’s smiling as he picks his way over the cobbled pavers and back to the house.


	7. 13 (April 2006) / 14 (November 2006)

_no, he loves me, he just makes me cry a lot_  
 _[april 2006]_  


There’s a cat. 

They’re in a jungle; its leaves are deep green under the moon. Magenta and navy. Noel smiles. They’ve rehearsed this scene half a dozen times. He picks his way across bark and fallen leaves and black gaffa tape crosses.

There’s a cat, a big one, a tiger. Somewhere. Close.

There are more trees, darker and taller, unfamiliar. There’s a path with no crosses, and he follows it, twisting and turning in and out of the trees. He sees a tail disappear into the dark, black-tipped. He runs, and there is moonlight, undergrowth, dark waxy leaves the colours of ink and blood. The cat growls and he sees it finally, but it’s not a tiger. It’s black, all black. 

It’s not meant to be a panther.

It stands over a carcass, ripping with its teeth, melting into the shadows. Noel takes a step forward. His foot snaps a branch; the sound slashes through the night, back and forth, growing louder and louder like an echo in reverse. The panther growls, pawing its prey, staking its claim. A scream rends the air, and Noel sees what he couldn’t before: those claws are sunk into Julian’s body. He steps forward again, instinctively, and the panther turns, growling in warning.

It’s wearing his face. Its eyes are burning red. It bares its teeth and Noel watches Julian’s blood drip from his own mouth.

Noel wakes with a start. He doesn’t have nightmares, ever. He has dreams, and they’re always in colour, always lit by the sun. His throat is dry and his bottom lip hurts. There’s a stinging metallic taste in his mouth. 

He feels very much like he’s going to be sick.

He sits up slowly, rubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. The other side of the bed is empty, and he stares at it blankly for a moment. It shouldn’t be empty. They always book two rooms but they’ve never _used_ them, not for ages.

Noel frowns. He doesn’t remember getting back to the room, but that’s not so unusual lately. He does remember fighting with Julian, and the guilty thought that _that_ isn’t so unusual now either strays across his brain before he can quiet it. He chances swinging his legs over the side of the bed and, when his stomach doesn’t immediately revolt, gets to his feet. The green digital numbers on the bedside table clock read 7:04.

He grabs the little throw-blanket from the end of the bed, wraps it around himself and pads out into the hall. It’s a horrifying time of morning, but he’s willing to bet Julian’s up. And if he’s not… well, Noel thinks, he’s a light sleeper anyway.

The door cracks open and Julian’s face appears after the second knock. “Oh,” he says. 

Noel wonders who else he thought it might be.

“What is it?” His voice is still scratchy. If he was already awake, it’s not been for very long. Noel swats at the guilt again.

“I had a nightmare.”

“And?”

He looks down at his feet, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “Can I come in?” 

Julian sighs and opens the door. “Do you know what fucking time it is?”

“Yeah,” he admits, scuffing a bare toe against the carpet and glancing around the room. Julian’s clothes are folded into piles on the chair, so he perches on a corner of the bed. Julian remains standing by the door. “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Julian says grudgingly. “I woke up about ten minutes ago, I was making tea. But that’s not the point. You can’t just come knocking at arse o’clock because you’re feeling shitty.”

“Well, you didn’t come back last night.”

“You told me to fuck off!”

“Sorry.” Julian raises his eyebrows and says nothing. “I am, Ju. I didn’t mean it. You know I didn’t.”

“Sounded like you meant it.”

“I didn’t.” He can’t bring himself to look at Julian, so he looks back at the floor. His thumb finds its way to his mouth, and he mumbles his next words around its tip. “'M sorry. Really. I fucked everything up.”

Julian sighs again, deeper and more resigned, and sits down next to him. “This has to stop,” he says. “This stuff you’re taking – you’re not like this, Noel. It’s making you into someone else. You have to stop.”

“I know.” Noel fiddles with the frayed edges of the blanket. “I don’t… It’s inside my brain. It stays in there all the time now. It's scaring me.”

“I know.” Julian rests a hand over his, stilling his fingers. “I know. I’ll help, yeah? Whatever you need, I’ll help.”

Noel doesn’t trust himself to say thank you, so he just flips his hand over where it’s caught and threads his fingers into Julian’s. Julian shakes his head.

“You’re hopeless. How much sleep did you get?”

“Dunno. Few hours?” 

“Get in then. I’ll make you some tea.” 

Noel crawls up the bed and pulls the duvet over him. The blanket from his room is caught between his cheek and the pillow, and he curls his fingers into it, watching as Julian re-boils the kettle and fishes in the tiny cupboard for another cup. When he falls asleep this time, he doesn’t dream at all.

  


_yes, i’m insecure, but so was my mother and her mother_  
 _[november 2006]_  


Julia takes a second test to be sure, and returns from the doctor’s appointment to tell him – not in so many words – that all his anxiety and excitement can now be doubled.

Julian doesn’t tell Noel for three weeks. 

For twenty-one and a half days he waits for the right moment, for when it’s just the two of them, for when he has the proper words. He squirms internally, weighing and calculating, and at 12:47am on a particularly cold Tuesday, Noel flicks a pen at him and says “You gonna tell me what’s wrong, or what?”

Julian stares at him, feeling even more helpless. Noel pushes away the notebooks he’s been scribbling in, picks up the coats they’ve left piled on the other seat of the sofa and flings them over the back of a stray chair, and flops down at Julian’s side.

“Come on, Ju. It can’t be that bad.” He pauses. “Wait, you’re not doing coke, are you?”

“What? No!”

“Good, then it can't be that bad. Tell me.”

“Julia’s pregnant.”

Noel’s mouth drops open in that ridiculous, comic way of his. “Really?”

“With twins.”

His mouth manages to fall open even further, his eyes wide like saucers. “No way. Fuck off, that's – that’s _amazing_.”

“You… You’re not upset?” He certainly doesn’t look upset, or shocked, or any of the other ten thousand options that Julian’s been running through his mind for most of the last month.

“Why would I be upset?”

There’s rain outside, hammering down through the inky midnight. Noel’s words rain into his head the same way, an endless syllabic repetition. _Why. Why. Why._ Julian’s envisaged so many endings to this conversation, but this one never once occurred to him.

“I don’t know,” he admits. His voice sounds like weak tea. “I thought… What if it changes things?”

“What things?”

“Everything. The show. This.” He can’t say _us_. He can’t. If he gives it voice, he gives it possibility, and it can never be a possibility. Not after everything they’ve survived. Not now, when things are finally normal again. “How can we do a show with twins?”

“We’ll put them _in_ the show! Howard and Vince can adopt a baby. Ha, imagine that – all those teenage girls’d flip their biscuits. It’d be well genius.”

“Noel!”

“Sorry.” Noel’s hand covers his as he apologises; it’s warm and familiar, and a knot begins to untwist ever so slightly in the pit of Julian’s stomach. “It’ll be alright though. I promise.”

A dry laugh escapes him. The knot cinches shut again. “You can’t know that. What if… Julia…” The words he needs evaporate as he reaches for them. He settles for waving his free hand plaintively through the air. Noel sighs and laces his fingers into Julian’s.

“She knows, Ju. She’s always known.” 

“But - ”

“No.” 

He sounds so sure, so adult. So unlike his normal, dreamy self, or the spaced out kid of a few months ago. He moves closer and Julian lifts his arm up instinctively, letting him curl into his side. Noel’s free arm snakes across his stomach. He speaks the answer to the question Julian won’t ask. “We’ll be alright. We’re always alright.”

Julian counts his breaths, in and out. He thinks back to the live show. To the myriad of scripts they’ve written and discarded. To the earliest circuits, where hardly anyone laughed. No matter how bad the gig, Noel had always come offstage with a grin, dragged him out into the cold for pint or a mug of bad tea and repeated the same refrain. _It’ll be alright. Promise._

He lets his chin drop down to rest on the top of Noel’s head and closes his eyes. Noel’s fingers are still woven into his own and he concentrates on them instead of the sick feeling in his stomach, hoping as hard as he dares that that refrain hasn’t been overplayed yet.


	8. 15 (August 2007) / 16 (September 2007)

_i had to leave, i felt lonely when he held me_  
 _[august 2007]_  


“Okay, one more time?”

“Fucking hell,” Noel mutters under his breath as the cameras are reset for the umpteenth time. Julian glances sideways at him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” he says tiredly, knowing Julian will understand that he means _no, I want to die_. It’s a stupid summer cold and of course no one but him has managed to catch it. His nose is stuffy and his head’s throbbing, and now his throat’s started burning hot and prickly like there's a hedgehog moved in, and all he really wants to do is lie down somewhere in a dark room for a week. Preferably, if he’s honest with himself, with Julian’s arms wrapped around him.

He tries to push the thought from his mind. Julian’s arms _are_ almost wrapped around him now; his hands stroke softly up and down the gauzy sleeves of Noel’s costume, but it feels all wrong. Julian’s hands are supposed to soothe him. Julian’s kiss is supposed make him feel warm and snug. In front of the half a dozen cameras pointed at them, any trace of comfort is obliterated and he’s left with only the bright, painful awareness that Julian’s lips feel like a stranger’s.

Paul clacks the marker. Noel says his line again, runs his fingers over Julian’s jaw again, presses his mouth against his again, again. Julian’s tongue traces gently along his lower lip and Noel tries not to remember how this usually feels, tries to remind himself that today he’s Vince and cameras mean nothing to him. Vince kisses with less shyness and firmer hands.

Vince doesn’t whisper Julian’s name in his ear like it’s a secret. 

“And… cut.” Paul beams up at them. “Lovely. So, maybe just - ”

“For fuck’s sake, Paul,” Noel cuts him off. “Half an hour, _please_. Ju’s already gonna have to surgically disinfect himself. If we do one more, you might as well send us both home now.” 

He punctuates his point with a handful of sneezes. Paul frowns and tuts and finally nods assent.

“Twenty minutes.” Noel slides down off the roof set as quickly as he can. “ _Twenty minutes_ ,” Paul repeats sternly and he nods yes as he passes him, slips out between the big metal doors and all but runs to the little room he and Julian have been having their lunches in.

He flops heavily down onto the low grey futon, letting his head tip back to rest against the brickwork. It doesn’t help the stuffy, aching feeling along his cheekbones but the darkness when he shuts his eyes is instantly relieving all the same. He doesn’t bother to open them when the door opens a few minutes later. It’s just him and Julian and that never-ending kiss sequence until the afternoon.

“Hey,” Julian says softly. Noel feels the cushions dip beside him. A cool hand strokes over his forehead. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah,” he breathes. “I just need - ”

“You need to rest. _Proper_ rest.” Noel cracks one eye open to see Julian scowling like a school teacher. “Not a five minute kip here and there.”

“Says the man who’s up all night with two fucking babies.”

“Babies sleep more than you’d think.” Julian slings an arm over his shoulders, pulling until he’s forced to lean against him or topple over. Noel lets his head drop into the crook of Julian’s neck. This time it fits properly, all the puzzle pieces turned the right way round, but the wrongness of earlier lingers in the pit of his stomach.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Marmalade sandwich?”

“Are you five?”

The burning in his throat fights its way out in a sharp, scratchy cough before he can think of a witty reply. “Wish I was,” he says miserably when he catches his breath. “I could be at home in bed watching cartoons.”

Julian pushes him back gently, studying him at arm's length. “You need aspirin,” he says, pressing his hand to Noel’s forehead again. “I’ll get you some Beechams. _And_ your marmalade sandwich.”

He doesn’t get up though. His hand runs over Noel’s hair again, ruffling it, tucking his fringe back into place. Noel lifts his head to find Julian’s eyes fixed on him in a way he's seen countless times before but which has never yet filled him with cold dread like it does now. Julian’s going to kiss him, for real this time, and Noel knows suddenly that the horrid strangeness will still be there, invading the spaces they’ve spent ten years filling.

He ducks his head again. Julian’s lips brush the top of it. His fingers catch under Noel’s chin, forcing it upwards.

“Oh, don’t.” Julian frowns, a poorly-disguised hurt that twists in Noel’s chest. He grasps and searches but he doesn’t have the words to explain how everything’s so off-kilter all of a sudden, so he pats Julian’s hand instead and says weakly, “I just don’t want to give you this.”

Julian’s frown smooths into a smirk. “No chance. You’re the only one who catches colds in summer, princess.”

He pets Noel’s head once more as he stands. The door closes softly behind him. Noel lets out a shaky breath, curls onto his side and closes his eyes, listening to the tread of Julian’s footsteps fading into the distance, away from him.

  


_it's not that he wants to be a liar, it’s just that he doesn’t know the truth_  
 _[september 2007]_  


It’s all going well until the dj looks over at him says, “So, what’s next?”

Julian has a headache. The coffee the young blonde girl sat down in front of them isn’t helping in the slightest. It’s over-brewed and over-sugared – he wonders if she went to the Noel Fielding School of Sugar, where one means three and make them heaped – and its growing rapidly cold in the tiny, air-conditioned studio.

“Julian’s getting his pilot’s licence,” Noel says, completely deadpan, “and we’re gonna make the next series from the inside of a Boeing.” 

The dj laughs and Noel glances sideways at Julian, one eyebrow slightly lifted. They all think it’s just nonsense, Julian knows, just Noel being his usual mental self. Only he recognises the gesture for what it is: a subtle distraction to move the focus away from Julian and back to the one of them who actually enjoys all this talking. He quirks the corner of his mouth at Noel, just so. _Thank you._

Regrettably, it has no effect. This guy either can’t or won’t take the hint. “But seriously,” he says, swivelling around on his chair so he’s facing Julian again, “what’s in the Boosh’s future? You just had twins, didn’t you? How’s that going to change things for you?”

“I don’t think it will,” Julian says, using every ounce of willpower to keep his voice light and his teeth unclenched. Under the desk, he feels the warmth of Noel’s hand slide over the top of his leg. Noel’s thumb rubs tiny, calming circles on the inside of his knee. Julian draws a breath. “I mean, you’ve met Noel. After three series with him, managing a couple of babies will be a breeze.”

They both laugh then, Noel and the dj, one with his chubby red cheeks puffed up like a squirrel, the other with his head tipped back in blissful abandon. His hair’s got longer. It tumbles an inch or two over the back of the chair and Julian’s fingers itch suddenly to touch it, to slide through the silky strands and lose themselves. Instead he shifts his weight to his left elbow and lets his hand slip unnoticed under the desk to rest on top of Noel’s.

Mercifully, the next question is aimed at Noel. He claims the two after it as well, talking too fast for too long, so that the only other things Julian has to say are goodbye, thank you, and it was a pleasure. Slipping out of the studio door is like shucking a dirty wet coat; he does it with physical relief.

Noel is silent until they reach the car.

“Alright?” he asks quietly as Julian pulls his door shut harder than necessary. Julian leans forward, resting his head against the steering wheel.

“I just wish they’d ask something different. Every one of them, it’s always the same fucking question. ‘Is this the end for the Boosh?’ ‘Will the Boosh retire now you’ve had kids?’ ‘How are you going to do the show with newborns?’ They’re just _children_ , for Christ’s sake, not the fucking apocalypse.” 

“I know.”

Noel’s fingers brush delicately over the cuff of his sleeve, down his bicep to the crook of his elbow. Julian lifts his head to look at him. He’s half-expecting that ridiculous, over-the-top grin and a quip, but it’s not there to greet him. Noel’s head is tilted slightly to the side, the smile on his face more gesture than actual emotion. It’s a tired, patient, _understanding_ smile, and Julian thinks he could kiss him for the rest of his life just for that.

“Is Dee home?”

“No. Why?”

“There’s three hours til the next one. I’m not spending it some bloody café. And I’m definitely not spending it sitting in the car.”

Noel says nothing, which Julian takes as both agreement and confirmation that he’s stocked up on tea and coffee recently. They drive in silence to a soundtrack of Nirvana and Bowie, Kings of Leon and The Cure, a mix so eclectic that the only possible concept behind its creation is “songs that would never be played back to back”. Noel bounces in his seat and taps his fingers to the bass lines. He rummages in his bag and pulls out lip gloss, hand cream, eyeliner, touching up all three while Julian turns corners he memorised long ago, and tries to quell the horrible idea that the past ten years have been a dream and he’s in imminent danger of waking up.

Noel toes off his boots the second they get in, but Julian just sinks back against the closed door and shuts his eyes, wishing he could shut out the world the same way. He wonders how far they’d get if he packed them a suitcase now, whether they could run fast enough together to escape the endless cycle of interviews and photoshoots.

“D'you want tea?”

He opens his eyes. Noel’s padding about in spectacularly mismatched socks, collecting up the paint supplies strewn across his sitting room floor.

“Nah, I’m alright.”

“Coffee? You look fucking knackered.”

“I’m fine.”

Noel dumps a bunch of brushes into the sink and levers himself up to sit on the kitchen counter. His heels bounce slowly back and forth off the cupboard. His eyes are narrowed in thought.

“What?”

“Just… don’t you wonder sometimes if they’re right? You’re _exhausted_ , Ju. What if…”

Noel’s hands are tucked between his knees, back to back, like a reverse prayer. He drags one side of his bottom lip in between his teeth. Julian stares at him until he finishes the sentence.

“What if we just stop for a bit, yeah? Just until the boys - ”

“Come here.”

Maybe it’s a concession to the exhaustion he so helpfully pointed out. Or maybe it’s something in Julian's voice, some fledgling parenting skill that compels him to obey. Whatever the reason, Noel does as he’s told without protest, dropping daintily onto his toes and crossing to perch on the edge of the sofa, a few feet from where Julian’s standing. Julian closes the space between them in two strides.

“I don’t want to stop,” he says quietly, resting his hands on Noel’s shoulders. “I don’t care how tired I look, I don’t want a break. We talked about this already. _Julia_ and I talked about it. Dads all over the country go to work with babies at home.”

“Dads all over the country aren’t filming til midnight.”

“The filming’s done though, isn’t it?”

“Ju - ”

“Noel. Stop. Look at me.” He does, all liquid blue eyes and out-of-place frown lines. “I _can’t_. We’ve been doing this for so long now it’s like a child too, see? It’d be like asking me to choose between my teenager and my new baby, and I can’t. I won’t choose between you.”

Noel’s arms slip around Julian’s hips. His palms burn against the small of his back. “Don’t you want to be there when they start to grow up?”

“Of course I do. And I will be.” He brushes Noel’s fringe out of his eyes. “But it won’t be at the expense of being there when you start to grow up.”

That’s all he needs to say to vanquish the frown marring Noel’s face. “I’m never growing up,” he grins, slipping to his feet and squeezing Julian in a tight hug.

It’s something he could have said at any time, on any day. It’s something he’s probably said before, truth be told. But today, in his silly socks, with his long hair and silk shirt and knotted pearl necklace, it’s so easy to believe. He looks like a child playing dress up, and Julian’s breath catches painfully in his throat.

“Don’t,” he whispers, brushing his lips against Noel’s forehead. “Don’t you ever. You’re perfect.”

Noel’s hands slide around to his front, up over his ribcage. They lock behind his neck, and Julian has time for one breath before familiar lips are crushed against his own and his world is reduced to a succession of teeth and tongues and frantic, scrambling fingers. Noel’s hands dance nimbly down the buttons of his shirt; they tug at his belt and flick the button on his trousers, and when Julian tries to step back, they grab at his waistband so fiercely that he loses his footing and tumbles backwards over the arm of the sofa, pulling Noel after him. 

He raises his head to see the top of Noel’s where he’s sprawled across him, face buried against his chest as he tries unsuccessfully to stifle his laughter. 

“Yeah, hilarious,” Julian mutters. There’s a book under his shoulder, a tattered paperback edition of _Paradise Lost_. He tosses it to the floor. “Little help, maybe?”

Noel pushes himself up and, with an infuriating smirk, yanks at his trousers so they’re somehow puddled around his ankles instead of his knees.

“Not quite what I had in mind,” Julian begins, but Noel crawls forward and silences him with another kiss.

“Course it is,” he says. He paints a trail with his lips across Julian’s collarbone, down to his heart. He squirms backwards again, rocking onto his heels, and settles himself across the top of Julian’s thighs.

Julian tries to shuffle out from underneath him, but Noel has him pinned, one knee planted firmly either side of his hips. The bulge of Noel’s cock against his own is somehow more obscene for the fact that he’s still got his jeans on, the stupid red ones Julian can never get him out of without help. Noel smirks down at him, beautiful and shameless, strands of hair falling messily into his eyes, and Julian sinks back, unable to look away, unable to blink or breathe. His hand brushes the edge of the discarded book. This, surely, is how Milton must have pictured Lucifer in the moments before he fell: bright with lust, pupils blown so wide they all but drowned the blue of his eyes, skin flushed with the heat of a world he shouldn’t belong to. A sweaty, dishevelled angel, perched on the brink of a precipice and completely uncaring of the fact that there was no way back.

“You,” he says slowly, hooking a finger in the belt loop of Noel’s jeans, “are a tart.”

“Yeah? Whatcha gonna do about it?” he asks, slipping a hand inside Julian’s boxers and wrapping it round his cock.

 _Nothing_ , Julian thinks, but the word doesn’t make it past his lips. Noel’s hand is soft and small like a girl’s, still moist from the hand cream he put on in the car. It moves languorously at first, up and back, up and back, a gentle caress that picks up speed when Noel leans down over him again. He mouths his way along the path he created for himself, heart to collarbone to clavicle. He whispers against his ear, utterly _filthy_ things he’d never say at full volume, in English and the bastardised French he’s learned on holiday. His breath is hot and his hand is hot, and when Julian squirms, Noel runs the blunt nail of one finger up the underside of his cock and flicks his thumb across the very tip, and that’s all it takes to leave him shuddering and gasping, coming all over Noel’s hand and his own thighs.

Noel’s still smirking when he finally opens his eyes. “You’re such a pervert when you’re cross.”

“I am not.”

“Yes you are. I never met anyone who does angry sex the way you do.”

“How many people have you _had_ angry sex with?” Noel waggles his eyebrows. Julian shakes his head. “And you call me a pervert. Jesus.”

“You love it. Go on, get in the shower. I’ll make tea.” He clambers off Julian’s lap and then pauses. “If you’re lucky, I might join you.”

Julian rolls his eyes heavenward as Noel skips back into the little kitchen, and pushes himself up off the sofa onto still-shaky legs. He waits for a moment, watching Noel rinsing his hands and murmuring to himself with a little smile, the way he always does after he gets him off. Julian doesn’t know what it is, words or song lyrics or just nonsense. Watching him now, he decides it probably doesn’t matter; it’s not what Noel’s saying, it’s how he’s saying it.

He takes a deep breath and heads down the hallway to the bathroom. His thoughts of earlier come drifting back, bringing memory in their wake: Noel’s face, younger and drunker; Noel’s fingers tugging on his shirt collar. _D’you reckon we could do that?_ He wonders whether there’s really anywhere far enough that no one would know their names.

It’s so tempting, the urge to walk back into the sitting room, to say yes, _yes_. But that was his chance to run, the night he let pass him by. And chances like that don’t come twice.


	9. 17 (March 2008) / 18 (October 2008)

_i can’t sleep because i can still taste him in my mouth_  
 _[march 2008]_

Julian almost trips as they stumble through the door of the hotel room, which only makes the two of them laugh harder. Noel collapses back onto the bed immediately, twisting one finger in the string of pearl beads he’s wearing and taking long, deep breaths until he’s no longer shaking with the force of his hilarity. He wipes at his eyes, trying not to smudge his eyeliner any more than it already is. Like it matters at two in the morning.

When he can breathe normally again, he sits up. Julian’s claimed the beer from the bar fridge and is leaning back against the little kitchenette’s counter. His face is still red from laughter. His eyes are fixed on Noel.

The room spins on its axis a few degrees and Noel shakes his head, trying to regain some of his balance. He’s not drunk, not really. It’s just the way Julian’s looking at him, tousled and wanton; it’s filling him up with champagne bubbles. He leans down to unzip his red boots, slowly and methodically, so he has something else to focus on for a minute.

“It was good though, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.” Julian’s lips purse around the bottle but his gaze doesn't move an inch. Noel toes off his boots and pushes them aside. Light-headed or not, the urge to go to him, to touch, inhale, _consume_ him is too strong to resist. Padding across the room in his socks, he slips his arms loosely around Julian’s waist and rests his chin against his chest. 

“I can’t believe you’re wearing that,” Julian says, setting his beer on the counter and gesturing to the little tulle petticoat Noel’s pulled on over his jeans. Noel wrinkles his nose.

“Get lost. I look great in pink.”

“You look like a girl in pink.”

“I look like a girl anyway,” he grins, turning his head to one side so he can hear Julian’s heartbeat. It’s frantic under his ear like a hummingbird’s wings. He smiles to himself, and presses a chaste kiss to the button in front of his nose. “Missed this.”

“Missed what?” Julian replies, and Noel can hear the smirk in his voice so he tightens his hold, pressing against him until he thinks Julian must be able to feel even the blood rushing through his veins. There’s a hand in his hair, suddenly, and another on the small of his back, pulling him closer still, crushing the air from his lungs. There’s a mouth, hot against his own, with familiar teeth that scrape his bottom lip the way he likes best, the way he’s always liked best. 

When Julian finally loosens his hold, Noel pushes up onto his toes, twining his arms around his neck, tracing his tongue along the shell of his ear. “Fuck me, Ju,” he breathes.

Julian leans back, letting his eyes travel the length of Noel’s body. “Too many clothes.”

“Can fix that.” He pushes at the pink petticoat, but Julian grabs his wrist before he can slip it off. 

“Don’t.” He takes a step towards him, his fingers slipping under the tulle netting, working the button at the top of Noel’s jeans. Noel takes a step of his own, backwards. He knows this game. Julian’s fingers brush against his stomach, sending little quivers shooting through him. They tug the zipper down. 

“Take them off,” Julian says, his voice hoarse, and then tugs at his t-shirt. “This too.”

“Pervert.” Noel grins, yanking the shirt up over his head and flinging it into a corner. He starts tugging the tight polka-dot fabric down over his knees, working his way backwards as he does, until the bed’s behind him and his jeans are bunched around his ankles, trapping his feet. He lets himself fall onto the bed again, poking his feet out towards Julian. “Help?”

He does, with a noise that’s almost a growl, and Noel nearly forgets to breathe. His socks join his jeans on the floor, first the yellow one with the blue spots, then the stripey one that reminds him of a liquorice allsort. A hand pushes firmly in the centre of his chest until he’s a human-shaped puddle on the bed, flat on his back and looking up at the man towering over him. His hand moves automatically to his hair, twisting a lock absently round his finger. Julian laughs.

“Now you look like a girl,” he says.

“Yeah?” Noel pushes himself up. The tulle is starting to itch and all he can think is that however much Julian’s stripped off him, he’s still got too many clothes on. He pushes the petticoat and his pants down together, roughly, kicking them off to join the pile on the floor. The only things left are his leather wrist cuff and the string of pearls, knotted at his sternum. They trail out like moonstone cobbles, a path to the bottom of his ribs. It’s somehow more obscene, leaving them on, as if these trivial decorations are adding to his nudity. “Come fuck me like one then.”

He’s never got any concept of time with Julian. Everything’s just a series of colour and sense: hands that manage to be all over him at once, fingers that fill him bright red and purple, the slow blue burn when Julian finally sinks into him, sticky with lube and sweat and desire. Noel twists and writhes every time, until his hair’s a mess and his fingers hurt from clenching the bed sheets. His ankles lock over Julian’s back. His own thigh presses against his chest. The world becomes Julian’s weight on him and between his tiny, whimpering mewls he asks himself why, why do they always leave it so long? 

Little things begin to work their way out of the chaos. Julian’s teeth nip at his collarbone and the pulse point he’s exposing. Noel turns his head slowly away from the tangle of sheets in his left fist, letting his eyes settle on Julian’s, letting his focus drift from one sensation to the next. The sharp jut of his hipbone against his right wrist, as he snakes his hand down in between their bodies to wrap it around himself. The way Julian slows and slows as Noel increases his speed, until he’s barely moving at all. The burn where their bodies meet, and the way his breath is nothing but ragged gasps. His hips are moving up all on their own like helium balloons and he’s biting his bottom lip, the tip of his tongue, anything within reach. His name breaks over Julian’s lips and his fingers twist in the sheets again until he’s beyond pain, beyond sensation, until the only feeling left in him is the air drying out his mouth as he gulps it in, the warmth on his belly and the faint press of pearls against his chest.

Noel lays there forever, listening to Julian’s breathing grow slower and slower. His entire body’s trembling and he listens to that too, a faintly plucked harp-string vibrating to a note that doesn’t exist outside this room.

  


_you're the song i rewind until i know all the words and i feel sick_  
 _[october 2008]_  


“He’s in here,” Dave says, ushering Julian into a tiny, darkened bedroom.

Noel’s sitting perched at the top end of the bed in a nest of pillows. His knees are drawn up tight to his chest, fingers drumming frantically up and down his shins, eyes almost lost under the anxious frown on his face. When he catches sight of Julian he scrambles up onto his knees, reaching his arms out like a child.

“Ju! Ju, where’d you go, everyone kept saying you were here but I couldn’t find you and no one would - ”

“Shh.” Julian sits down beside him, letting Noel’s clinging arms wrap around him. His hand instinctively slips around to rubs circles on his lower back, to calm him the same way he’s been calming him for years now. “Shh, I didn’t go anywhere.”

“But Dave said - ”

“Dave made a mistake.”

Noel’s waiflike body is pressed flat to his chest, the bony point of his collarbone digging into Julian’s larynx. He works his hands up between them until they’re under Noel’s armpits and pushes him gently back an inch. He’s so thin Julian’s fingertips meet in the hollow between his shoulder blades.

“Come on, sit back here. You might be a Twiglet but you’re crushing the life out of me.”

Noel does, but he does it with his hand clutching one of Julian’s so tightly that it makes Julian’s bones rub together under his skin. His other hand is fisted in the blanket at his side. He looks young, Julian thinks. Young and scared, and he wishes he’d thought to ask Dave what Noel took, because whatever it is, it’s nothing like coke and Julian has no idea what he ought to do for him. He settles for stroking his hair out of his eyes with his free hand.

“So tell me then. What’s going on?”

Noel giggles suddenly, all traces of frown vanishing as cleanly as if they never existed. “I’m following the yellow brick road,” he says. “Like they told me.”

“You’re… Like who told you?”

“Them! In the thing, in the film. Except they got it wrong, you don’t get ruby slippers once you get here, you need them to come over. I got them, Ju, they’re so tiny and red and now I’ve gone over the rainbow.” 

“Jesus,” Julian mutters under his breath. Pills, then. He casts his mind back, trying to remember which ones are the red ones and what you’re supposed to do about them. Noel squeezes his hand and lets go, squeezes and lets go, as if it’s a heart he’s trying to keep alive. “How many did you take?”

“You have to come over,” he says, like he hasn’t heard. “There’s so many people you need to meet here. Plant people, daphne and laurel and narcissus. I feel like Persephone.”

 _Dehydration_ , Julian thinks. He’s pretty sure that was common to all of them, red or otherwise. He lays a hand to Noel’s forehead, relieved to find his temperature feels normal. 

“Noel, how many?”

“She had six pomegranate seeds.”

“ _Six_?”

“It’s not so many. Just a tiny mouthful, really. Months of darkness and all she got was a tiny taste of pomegranate. I only had half that.” He tips his head to one side. “Will you miss me when Hades takes half my heart?”

“Will you stay here while I go and get you some water?” 

“You can’t go, you just got here!”

“I’ll only be a minute. Just stay here, yeah?”

Julian dashes down to the kitchen, so quickly he barely notices his feet hitting the ground. Drunk or drugged, it doesn’t matter – Noel has a habit of following him when he’s told not to and the last thing either of them need is him breaking himself open on a flight of stairs. On the way back up Julian takes them two at a time, a full glass of water in each of his hands. Noel, blessedly, hasn’t moved except to pull the blanket into his lap.

“Here,” Julian says softly, tugging the blanket off him for fear he’ll overheat. “Drink this for me?”

He sits back on the bed beside him as he drinks the first glass of water. He listens to Noel’s chatter, waiting until he thinks enough time has passed for the second; when that’s empty he refills them both in the little bathroom and repeats the process. Noel’s words eventually die off into dreamy quietness. His eyelids droop heavily, fluttering up again every so often and then closing once they’ve seen Julian’s still there.

Julian eases up off the bed, pressing his hand back to Noel’s forehead, just in case. Still normal. A hand reaches up for his, its fingers twining between his own. “Are you going?”

“Yes. It’s late. I’m tired.”

“Please don’t. Please, Ju, I need - ”

“You need to sleep, Noel. And I need to go home.” He disentangles his hand from Noel’s grasp. “We’ve been all up and down the fucking country. I’ve got one week with my family, I don’t intend to spend it on the floor of someone’s spare room.”

“But I thought…” Noel’s voice wavers. His eyes are watering; his fingers grasp plaintively out into the air. “You said you’d never choose between us,” he whispers, and the hurt is written too plainly all over his face. “You _said_.”

Julian grits his teeth, reminding himself that it doesn’t matter how young or how sad he looks, he’s still an adult. That he makes his own choices. That there are younger children who need him more.

“I didn’t, love,” he says, trying to ignore the guilt that coats his mouth. He walks to the door. “You chose for me.”


	10. 19 (November 2008) / 20 (February 2009)

_because i didn’t want to die waiting for you_  
 _[november 2008]_

Noel is patient. He goes to all the after-parties. He smiles as he accepts the free drinks. He holds strangers’ hands and waits for Julian to hold his. 

They drive through Bristol and Birmingham. 

He goes to all the after-parties for the after-parties and waits for Julian to say he’ll join him, because Julian always joins him sooner or later. 

They drive through Nottingham and Portsmouth. 

He sits alone in the quiet times, away from Dave and Rich, and waits for Julian to sit down beside him. Waits for him to apologise, because Julian’s never held a grudge, not once. Not the first time over that stupid Hawaiian shirt. Not when Noel neglected to mention he couldn’t drive until they actually got to Australia. Not when he went out and bought back enough sweets to fill a backpack but forgot to get Julian the sandwich he’d asked for.

They drive to Brighton and Noel is still waking up alone.

They talk. Of course they talk. They talk about the size of the crowds, the weather, whatever book Noel’s listlessly flipping through today. They talk about where to go for lunch. But Julian’s eyes are always far away. He comes to the parties but he’s never there properly; he’s in another party, another world that Noel can’t reach, not by plane or train or taxi. He wonders if maybe he could reach him again if he took the right pills or drank the right drink, but nothing here is labelled for him the way it was for Alice.

On their third day in Brighton, Julia drives down and Noel watches Julian play on the beach with his sons. After ten minutes, he climbs back into the bus.

“Alright?” Dave asks, looking up from his laptop.

“Tired.” Noel slips down onto the little sofa. “Brighton’s breaking me.”

“Yeah,” Dave says with a dry laugh. He clicks the computer lid closed. “Lunch. I’m starving. Want anything?”

“Nah.” He puts one of the magazines from last Sunday’s paper over his face for effect. “I’m gonna pass out for an hour.”

“Yep. See you after, then.”

The door closes with a metal thud and Noel lays in silence with the magazine over his face, breathing in and out. It’s past midday but it’s still cold and his breath beads in shiny patches all over the dark, glossy pages. He closes his eyes, focusing on the feel of it, filling his whole awareness with condensation.

The door opens again. He swats the magazine off his face. “What’d you forg- oh.”

Julian closes the door more softly than Dave had and walks over to stand by his feet. 

“Can I sit down?” he asks, and Noel pulls his legs up. He holds them there, awkwardly, peering up over his knees. At any other time he’d have stretched them right back out over Julian’s lap but it seems wrong with all this distance and silence. Or at least, it does to him. Julian obviously isn’t as bothered because he grabs Noel’s ankles and pulls his legs out straight again. 

“What y’doing, Noel?” he asks, his voice gruff like a bear from a children’s cartoon. 

“Having a kip?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Noel closes one eye, squinting at him through the other like a pirate. Julian’s hands are hot on his shins. The tops of Julian’s thighs are hot against the back of his calves. It’s the warmest Noel’s felt in days.

“I missed you,” he says, opening his eye.

“I’ve only been gone an hour.” His hands drift slowly, left and right, up and down. Leaves on a river.

“No, I mean – you’re not here anymore, not really. After the show, you’re somewhere else. I look at you and you’re thousands of miles away.”

“I’m just tired.”

Julian’s hands keep moving, absently, like the way he looks at him now, and Noel wants to cry or scream or kick him until he listens and tell him that that’s not it, that he’s not just tired, that everything’s wrong and there’s a universe between them, even here on this tiny sofa. But he’s never had the right words without Julian’s help, so he just shrugs. 

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” Julian’s hands stop moving. He looks at him and sighs and for a second, underneath the absent exhaustion, he’s _Julian_ again, looking at Noel and sighing with the shrunken remnants of a Hawaiian shirt clutched in his fist. “Because it’s not just you, alright? It fucking hurts me too. And I can’t… I can’t watch you like that.”

Without the gentle drift of Julian’s leaf hands along his legs, Noel feels suddenly sick. He pushes himself up until he’s sitting, his eyes level with Julian’s. He still hasn’t got the right words.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. It repeats brokenly, around and around in his head. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry._

“I know. Me too.” Julian’s hands move to rest heavily on top of his own. “Look, I better – Julia’s leaving soon. I have to go see them off. But we need to talk about this, later, okay?”

“Yeah.” Noel swallows a deep breath. It pools coldly in his lungs. “Okay. Tell her goodbye from me, yeah?”

“I will.”

Noel sinks back down onto the sofa when the door is finally closed and drops the magazine back over his face. This time the moisture beads on him, at the corners of his eyes, along his lashes. This time he ignores it. When Dave comes back, he takes long, slow breaths and pretends he’s deep in dreams. 

They do the third Brighton show and Julian holds his hand after the red curtain falls for the final time. They go to the after-party and Julian stands by his side as he smiles at the strangers. Songs segue into one another and Julian’s hand never leaves his, but his eyes stray to his left wrist with increasing frequency.

“You gonna turn into a pumpkin?” Noel asks, his lips close to Julian’s ear. Julian smiles and shakes his head. “You’re not coming out after, are you?”

“I’m wrecked.” Julian’s hand squeezes his tightly. “Tomorrow, yeah? I’ll come with you tomorrow.”

Noel is patient, but it’s always today in this world he’s in. He sits squashed into the back of a cab with Rich and Dave, and wonders if tomorrow would come faster if he slept like a normal person. He takes the hands of people he doesn’t know, and he smiles at the drinks they bring him. He imagines Julian sleeping, waking up in tomorrow in his blue-striped pyjamas, while he’s still stuck in the humid dark of an after-party for an after-party. Someone has something, a bag of pills that look like sherbet pips. Maybe these are the right ones, he thinks, turning it over and over between his fingers. He takes one out; just one, just for tonight. One to take him into tomorrow, so he doesn’t have to be here alone, surrounded by all these people. So he can forget that there’s a dark cartoon bear with a perfect blonde family sleeping somewhere without him.

  


_we covered the smell of loss with jokes_  
 _[february 2009]_

_Noel hates endings._

Julian lays on top of the still-made bed, turning the thought over in his mind, waiting for what he knows will come. Tomorrow they’ll drive back to London but tonight belongs to another hotel room, another half-sized cup of tea before bed, another pillow that doesn’t fit his head properly. Faint, muffled noises of ablution drift out from the little bathroom. The shower door opening and closing. An electric toothbrush. The smooth hiss of water hitting ceramic. 

He’s almost completely in darkness; the only illumination is from the little down light above the kettle. Julian wonders whether or not he should flick on the lamp beside the bed as well when the bathroom door opens and Noel emerges, a silhouette in a square fluorescent glow.

Julian’s fingers slip away from the light switch. Even at this distance Noel’s eyes look puffy, his face wan. When he reaches the edge of the bed, Julian can see perfect red arcs underlining his bottom lashes, better than any cosmetic could do. He sits down gingerly, a contradictory mess of self-control and agitated nerves. 

There’ll be no sending him to his own room tonight.

Julian pushes up into a sitting position, leaning back against the headboard. Noel stays where he is, hunched over, elbows propped up on his knees and head cradled in his hands. Lonely drops of water plink from the bathroom tap into the sink at regular intervals. After a silence that feels like years, they’re joined by the sound of smothered, hiccupy sobs.

“Oh, come on,” Julian says, keeping his tone light. Softness and sympathy only ever make things worse. He leans forward to touch a hand to Noel’s shoulder. “Mike’s not even here to set you off. Who you gonna blame this time?”

“Shut _up_ ,” Noel cries, high and strangled, spinning to swat furiously at Julian’s hand. He pulls back but Noel keeps whacking at him, little ineffectual slaps at his forearm and shoulder as he uses his other hand to brush tears off his cheeks. “Shut it, just shut up.”

“Hey.” He catches Noel’s hand easily in his own. Noel doesn’t even try to struggle; as Julian’s fingers close around his wrist he drops his head, shoulders heaving. Tears drip onto his lap in perfect counterpoint to the bathroom sink. His untrapped hand lays limp at his side.

“Hey,” Julian says again, a whisper among the water droplets. He shuffles down the bed, pulling Noel towards him until he can wrap him up in his arms. “We’ll do it again, yeah? You need a rest first, but we’ll do it all over. We’ll… we’ll do a jungle one. You’d love that, all those tigers. Vince could have a mirrorball tree-house.”

A shaky little laugh rises up to Julian’s ears. Noel lifts his head. He’s tear-stained and swollen. His hair is damp; it sticks out at a hundred different angles. His eyes are desperately wide and bloodshot, and there are deep red marks on his bottom lip where he’s been biting it.

It doesn’t matter, any of it. He’s still horribly, painfully beautiful.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“It won’t be the same though,” he says, sniffling. His voice scratches and tears at the calm dark.

“No.” Julian stroking the worst of his fringe back into order. “It’ll be better.”

Noel shrugs out of Julian’s embrace, clambering onto the bed and over his knees before curling back into his side. Julian slumps back down, one hand rubbing steady circles over the lower bumps of Noel’s spine. His shoulder becomes a pillow, his stomach the resting place for Noel’s carelessly flung arm. 

In the dark he listens to their breathing and waits for what he knows will come. Later Noel will fall into the still, dreamless slumber that crying always brings him. Later Julian will slip his numb arm out from underneath the exhausted body; he’ll pull the blankets up over them and smooth down the errant black hairs that tickle his nose. In the morning they’ll mumble tiredly over tea in a language no one but them can understand, and Noel will complain that his cheekbones hurt and he doesn’t have the right shoes.

Tomorrow they’ll drive back to London and resume their lives.


	11. 21 (June 2009) / 22 (August 2009)

_i was still lonely so i did even lonelier things_  
 _[june 2009]_

Loneliness is easiest when he’s by himself.

There are twenty-seven days until they fly to the US. Noel knows because he’s counted them down since the tour ended. He hates himself more every time he marks the calendar. Each little check is time made physical, a small hourglass tipping his grains of sand away, reminding him that he doesn’t hold infinity in his hands.

He stays up all night because it’s harder to pretend when the sun is shining. He goes out more than he should. The drinks are still free; the drinks will probably always be free now. Time moves faster when he’s drunk, and it vanishes entirely when he’s high, and if it’s moving then that means Julian is a few hours and minutes closer to being back in his life. 

But it also means that _time moves faster_ and that’s a violation of everything he’s taught himself to believe. 

It’s easier when he stays home. There are people everywhere in clubs. The one person, the only person, who should be there is not. At home he climbs out onto the roof. At home, it’s just him and the sky.

There are charts, Noel knows, for moonrise, the same as there are for sunrise. He never bothers. He wanders up the stairs to the roof and sits by the big chimney pots, and he waits. Time moves slowly again. He can almost forget that it exists. 

Sometimes the moon comes to listen. Sometimes it doesn’t and he talks to the stars instead, learning their lives.

Tonight the moon is a tiny sliver of white to the west, already halfway across the heath. It exudes shyness when it’s new like this; Noel feels like he should speak softly, so as not to frighten it.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he says. “I missed you.”

He tells it about his week, the robin he saw arguing with a squirrel, Nigel’s new kitten. He tells it all the inane, small things he can think of, examining the backs of his hands in the city's dirty yellow light.

“I’m going to America soon,” he says, lifting his head to look at it. “With Julian. Well, with everyone, but I’m mainly gonna be with Ju and I think… I think he hates me a bit.”

The words are a lead locket at his throat, weighing him down, choking him. He speaks again, faster, hoping that a critical mass of language will snap the yoke from his neck.

“I mean, he probably should, because I fucked up a lot. I didn’t – it sounds completely stupid to say you didn’t do it on purpose, doesn’t it? Because I did, really. I chose it. But I didn’t know how else to find him, he’s always so far away now and I just… I just want it to be how it was.”

The moon bleeds cold pearlescence into the sky and says nothing. Noel wonders if it’s even heard. It’s lower now, fading into the blackest part of the horizon. He watches it fall until the very tip of its crescent is swallowed up by the night.

Noel stays on the roof after it leaves. There are people on the street below and none of them have the face he wants to see. He sits with the stars until they fade as well, blending into the grey light of dawn. He says goodnight to the sun as it pokes its head over London’s parks.

He crawls into bed as the day lightens around him, curling his hands into fists. He presses them against the ache in his chest.

They don’t fill it.

  


_we emotionally manipulated one another until we thought it was love_  
 _[august 2009]_  


“Don’t.”

Julian looks from Julia back to the phone that’s buzzing again on the bedside table. The digital alarm clock glows a soft red behind it, telling him that yes, it is in fact ridiculous o’clock.

“I have to. I’ll be quick.”

He grabs the phone, wrapping his hands around it to quiet the vibrations. Only when he’s in the darkness of the sitting room does he hit the answer button.

“Hi, Noel.”

“Ju!” Noel’s voice is horrifyingly cheerful down the line, a rainbow buoyed up by dark, throbbing music. “Where are you?”

“At home,” he says with a sigh, sinking down onto the sofa for the fourth time that night, and proceeds to answer the next several questions the same way he did an hour ago. No, he’s not coming out. Yes, he’s sure. No, he wasn’t sleeping and it’s fine that Noel called, really, it’s fine, but shouldn’t he be getting back to the people he’s with before they miss him? 

When he hangs up, he tosses the phone to one side and lets his head sink heavily into his hands. He stays there until the pounding in his temples has abated and his knees are stinging from the weight of his elbows digging into them.

Julia’s still awake when he gets back to the bedroom. The boys, in the little blue room across the hall, are mercifully still asleep.

“This has to stop.”

“I know.” He sits his phone on a book so its vibrate won’t be quite so ghastly next time.

“Really. Stop answering him. Turn your phone off.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” Julia’s voice is soft, sympathetic. She reaches out to lay her hand across his own. “You have to. I know you love him but- don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that,” she says, smoothing her thumb over the crease between his eyebrows. “Like I’m certifiable. It’s hardly a secret, Jules. But that’s it, see? This isn’t going to get any better. He’ll keep going, and you’ll let him.”

“What if I don’t?

“You will. How long have I known you now? Both of you?” Her fingers stroke idly over the back of his hand, repetitive and soothing. “You joke about how he followed you around, but how long has it been since he’s followed you anywhere?”

Julian looks up to meet Julia’s gaze. There’s none of the cold steel he expected to find there, just a faint, regretful sorrow.

“You follow him,” she says gently, “because you love him. We all know you do. And it’s okay, because he needs you to follow, and you need him to need you. But if this keeps going, you’re going to follow him right into whatever hell he’s looking for, and you can’t do that. Not anymore.”

He doesn’t need to look across the hallway again to know she’s right. Julian sighs, wrapping her long, thin fingers up in his own. “I know, Juliette.” She smiles a little at the pet name, one he thought up years ago when she insisted that he was Jules because she couldn’t very well call him Ju like Noel did, could she? “I know.”

“It’s for the best,” she whispers, kissing him softly on the cheek before she flicks the lamp off.

Julian’s fingers fumble across the top of his bedside table in the darkness. They close around a smooth, plastic shape and for the first time in twelve years, he turns his phone off instead of on in case Noel calls.

He doesn’t feel any less of an arsehole when three new messages arrive the next morning. There’s a sad, knowing look in Julia’s eyes as he listens to his voicemail and he repeats her words of the night before over and over in his head as he helps get the boys’ breakfast.

It’s for the best.


	12. 23 (September 2009) / 24 (November 2009)

_i cut him out at the root; he was my favourite tree, threatening the foundations of my home_  
 _[september 2009]_  


“Hi, this is Julian, leave a message.”

“This is the fifth fucking message. Call me back, you cunt.” 

Noel stabs his fingertip viciously against the end call button two, three, four times, and tosses his phone aside with a scowl. His head’s still throbbing even though he’s had about fifty glasses of water today. He’s supposed to be at the studios for the new season of Buzzcocks in an hour. The sky is a heavy blanket of grey, a hundred thousand lint balls flattened together, choking him with thick, fuzzy fingers. He pulls his knees up against his chest, wondering how much yelling he’d cop if he stayed in and drank tea all night instead.

The shrill notes of his message tone pierce the air and Noel scrambles for the discarded phone. 

It’s not Julian. It’s something from Dee which he doesn’t bother to read before he hurls the phone at the opposite wall with a shriek of fury.

“This is fucking _ridiculous_ ,” he snarls to the tidy spines of his books and the blank, black television screen. He curls himself into the corner of the sofa, jabbing at it with his elbows. It doesn’t get any more comfortable. After a minute he unfurls himself.

The front room is still and silent. He can feel the sky lowering around him.

His tartan coat is hanging messily off the side of an arm chair and he jumps up, seizing it roughly, pulling it on. He grabs the first hat he can find, a black bowler that’s perched on the fruit bowl beside his keys. His phone’s bounced underneath a coffee table but it’s still in one piece, still on; the bored, cool voice on the other end says his cab will be ten minutes.

It’s freezing outside, colder than October has a right to be, but he’s not staying inside any longer than he has to. He glares at the low grey clouds, daring them to come closer. They don’t reply.

The ride to Julian’s is short and, mercifully, silent. Noel lets his finger hover over the doorbell for few seconds, breathing deep, cold breaths. There’s always the chance Julia will answer and she’s done nothing to deserve the bright ugly rage that’s coiled in the pit of his stomach. 

“Can I – Noel. Hi.” Julian’s hair is hanging scruffily into his eyes, and he’s wearing old, scuffed slippers. Noel remembers when they were new. 

“I… I called you,” he says. The words feel sticky in his throat; they come slow like treacle. “But you didn’t answer.”

“Sorry, I’ve been busy.”

“All fucking day?”

“Yes.” Julian sighs heavily. “Ever tried looking after twins? They don’t have an off switch, Noel.”

“Probably why I never had any. I get bored of the telly after five minutes.”

“I know.” 

Julian shuffles his weight from foot to foot. He _looks_ like he’s been busy, Noel thinks. He looks frayed, a threadbare teddy that one too many children have tugged on, and he’s suddenly not sure whether he wants to punch him or hug him. It’s easier to be angry at his voicemail.

“Look, I’m sorry. It’s been it’s a shit week.”

He looks like he’s been busy, but a tiny, hurt voice at the back of Noel’s mind reminds him that last week was a shit week too.

“It’s only Monday.”

“You’re telling me. Just – give me till the weekend, yeah? I’ll call you.”

He looks sincere, but Noel’s still standing on his front step instead of sitting at his table with a cup of tea.

“Yeah,” he says dully. “Alright.”

“Buzzcocks tonight, yeah?”

“Yeah.” He waits, but Julian just watches him. “First one of the season. I – I better go. See you after.” 

“Yep.”

The click of the door latch sounds horribly loud in the day’s dying light. In the cab home, Noel erases Julian’s number from his phone and stares moodily out the window at the slate sky, wishing he could erase it from his memory so easily. 

The next Monday passes and a third has arrived when his phone rings. It’s still not Julian. It’s the overly bubbly PR girl, reminding him that the Bunny and the Bull opening is this Friday and there’s another lot of music awards Wednesday night that he and Julian are invited to. He listens to her chirp, conjuring up his received calls list in his mind. When she pauses for breath he cuts her off, answering for both of them.

He goes alone, armoured in sequins and silver, and practices saying the words ‘Julian’s busy, sorry’.

  


_i’m not a dog_  
 _[november 2009]_

Noel’s already at the studio when he arrives, lounging in a plaid-covered armchair with the sort of easy grace that might suggest he owned the place to a casual observer. His head’s buried in a book but he looks up the second Julian steps into the room. He’s wearing a headband with furry little ears on top, a shaggy woollen jumper patterned in brown and white around the collar, and eyeliner so thick that he resembles nothing quite so much as a red panda. 

But he looks well, Julian thinks; childlike in a way that has nothing to do with age or silly hair accessories. His edges are softer, all their cocaine sharpness smoothed away. There’s a bright blush of innocence in his eyes that’s been missing for so long Julian had almost forgotten it was ever there to begin with.

He stays standing in the doorway, suddenly unsure if he wants to move into the room at all. It’s strange to see Noel again so quickly when they’ve virtually been strangers for the past few months. Today’s shoot was booked ages ago, back when Noel had still felt like a natural extension of himself. Now he feels like something sick and wrong in Julian’s spaces, like an unexpectedly sweet cup of tea when you’ve finally given up sugar for good. 

“Alright?” Noel asks, fiddling with the headband, and Julian forces himself to take a step forward.

“Yeah,” he says, crossing the room to perch on the edge of the other armchair, re-acquainting himself with the taste of sucrose. “You?”

“Yep. I mean, aside from being out of bed at arse o’clock.”

“It’s half eight!”

“ _And_?”

He looks so indignant that Julian can’t not laugh, a dry little chuckle that grows as Noel pretends outrage until he can’t keep a straight face either and is forced to join in, and after a minute the room is full to bursting with the sounds of merriment. The warmth of it slowly melts the tension in Julian’s belly, so that he can settle back in the chair at Noel’s side, loose and relaxed, a man who can savour the taste of sugar rather than choke on it.

A girl brings them tea which Julian sips gratefully, wrapping his hands around the mug to warm them up. Noel practically inhales his, and the pink wafers on the tray beside it, and spends the next twenty minutes alternating between chasing the crumbs with a moistened fingertip and telling Julian about the book he had his nose in earlier, something about painters and dead men. 

“It got nominated for a prize!” Noel says when Julian raises his eyebrow in response to the three-sentence plot summary.

“Didn’t win though, did it?”

“No.” Noel licks his fingertip and plucks the last crumb of wafer off the plate. “But the good ones never do. Everyone knows that.”

The next three hours pass in a repetition of set, freeze, snap as their photographer takes shot after shot, occasionally frowning over the lighting or the way Noel’s fringe is falling into his eyes. It’s disturbingly like every other shoot they’ve ever done; personal spaces are noted and then ignored, hands and limbs work their way closer to one another. By the last few shots, Noel’s palm is pressed against the small of Julian's back, Noel’s arm is wrapped around his waist, Noel’s head is cushioned against his shoulder. It’s almost the way it used to be, and when he heads back into the little sitting room to collect his backpack and jacket, Julian feels like he’s just been bathed in sunshine and treacle.

“Hey, Ju?” 

He turns to see Noel hovering in the doorway, brown furry ears back on his head and a shy smile on his face. 

“You wanna get tea? Or lunch? I’m starving.”

“You should eat more than pink wafers for breakfast then.”

“Ha, maybe. Come buy me a proper grown up’s meal then?” His voice is as sweet as newly-made fudge, and Julian’s stomach twists as the sick tension of earlier floods through him again.

“I… I should get home, actually.”

“’Course.” Noel drops his gaze to the floor. His words are still soft, but they’re no longer warm and buttery; they’re the dark bitterness of sugar that’s been left too long over a flame.

“Noel - ”

“Nah, s’fine. Another time, maybe.” He remembers to smile, but he’s still not actor enough to correct the slump in his shoulders. 

Julian watches him walk away in silence and tries not to hate himself all the way home.

He hears Noel’s voice in his head all afternoon. For forty-nine hours, he tells himself that he’s the one in control of his life. He’s not a dog to come when his master calls. He’s an adult, a capable, responsible adult. He makes his own choices.

When he finally presses the buttons on his phone that spell out Noel’s number, his hands are shaking and his breath is coming in short, shaky gasps. He feels sick to his core, as though _he_ is the addict, the one to be pitied.

It’s possible – _just_ – he tells himself, that Noel is still asleep at 1pm on a Sunday. He leaves a message, polite, apologetic. He makes tea while he waits for his phone to ring. He drums his fingers when the hour hand reaches the two, and leaves the house entirely when it reaches three.

He calls again that night; this time, his voicemail is shorter and sharper. The sleep that claims him is restless, full of dark voices that sound like his own telling him he’s a hypocrite, that he deserves this. 

There’s no missed call when he wakes, and no text. Email’s a lost cause but he checks it anyway, scowling through his first and second cups of tea. The voices from his dreams play at the edges of his hearing. _I had children to look after_ , he thinks viciously in their direction. _I had responsibilities_. 

For the rest of the day, he reminds himself of this whenever he checks his phone. He was a responsible adult. He put his family first. 

There’s still no missed call by the time he goes to bed, and this time when he tugs the covers over himself, Julian feels utterly justified in calling Noel petulant. He tells himself this is it, fiercely, as he falls asleep. Let Noel have his childish spite. Next time he won’t bother. He’ll show up, he’ll do what’s expected of him and no more. He’ll walk away without a backward glance.


	13. 25 (February 2010) / 26 (June 2010)

_it just didn’t work out_  
 _[february 2010]_

Noel spends Monday in his studio.

His head’s full of voices and half-formed thoughts he can’t pin down. His fingers feel possessed. They move awkwardly, refusing to paint what he thinks he’s thinking of. He tries to clear his mind and paint nothing at all but that never works; the streaks of colour take form, resembling _things_. He drinks strong, sweet tea as he cleans his brushes and stares at clean white surfaces. He tries to paint the demons that dance through his head, the one with the eyepatch, the orange one, the one that whispers in his ear when the night is darkest. They refuse to come out, and the plates end up scrawled over with suspicious faces that all remind him of Julian. 

Lliana calls. Her words are shrill in his ear and he mumbles in reply. He’s never been good at arguments. He’ll call her back, he thinks, when the line goes dead in his ear; he’ll give her an hour or two and call her back.

He drinks more tea and lays on his back on the floor. Five Bryan Ferry’s stare down at him. He stares back until the sun comes up.

There’s a packet of Quavers beside the kettle. He crunches them, cross-legged in front of a two foot high canvas. This time he takes care with the lines, shading, highlighting. When he’s done he reaches for a pad of paper and pastels, blending colours with the tip of his little finger.

Lliana calls again, pleading in low, buzzing noises to his voicemail message. He’ll call her back, he tells himself. Soon. 

He finds a clean brush.

The sun disappears and reappears, and disappears again. He sleeps like Einstein, an hour at a time, curled up on the sofa or on the floor beside his paintbox, head cushioned against the inside of his arm.

The tea runs out. He frowns at it, and fumbles for his phone. It’s so new its screen is still unscratched; its body glimmers reflections instead of paint smears. It says Friday in tidy white letters, and he counts the days on his hands.

He’ll go home, he thinks, looking in the cupboards for the coffee. Soon.

The instant blend is dark and bitter in his throat. He fills another six canvases.

He makes the mistake of looking up at the bathroom mirror as he’s washing his hands; his face is smeared with acrylics and stubble. The skin underneath is deathly pale. Streaks of sun bleed through the tiny window and when he pulls out his phone again, it says Saturday, 7:13 am.

There are four sheets of pastel paper, seventeen canvases, six white plates and a cereal bowl spread around the studio. Each one has the same dark-haired face branded on it. 

He closes the door on them, pulls his phone from his pocket and adds a number to his contacts that never should have been left out. 

The whispering inside his head stops.

  


_i’m a lover without a lover_  
 _[june 2010]_  


Without any warning, Noel’s face is suddenly everywhere he looks. 

It’s not that it’s unexpected, not exactly. There are interviews piling up, people wanting to know about the album and the app, and when the film is going to be made. They’re scheduled for NME, GQ, a New York screening. Technically they’re still working on the album, although Julian hasn’t been to the little studio in over a month and he’s willing to bet Noel hasn’t either.

It’s not unexpected. But this, now, is like the universe or some sadistic guardian angel has decided that the only cure for distance is saturation. Julian drops Julia off for some post-production work on _Eileen_ and Noel’s there, leaning against the wall at the front of the studio, cigarette in hand and eyes to the sky. He takes the boys for their injections, at what is apparently the only surgery in London with an up-to-date selection of reading material, and Noel’s face stares back at him from the pages of The Observer. He switches on the television to find a repeat of _Party_ , and flicks it off again before Vince’s voice can embed itself in his ears.

When he pulls a book off the shelf and a photograph of the two of them falls out of it, he decides to take it as a sign. There’s a week until they fly to New York. A fresh audience; a fresh start. He tells himself he’ll put things right, that they’ll be okay again. 

The flight to New York is long, full of pointing and whispers. Noel is overtired, restless; he bounces in his seat and draws on his arms and finally Julian puts on the headphones and the little black blindfold and feigns sleep just so he’ll stop talking. Noel kisses him on stage the first night, drunk and shameless. His arms around Julian’s waist feel just like they used to, but by the end of the show, Noel is high on sugar and adoration. He leaves with Rich and Dave and nary a backwards glance, and Julian goes to bed alone. For the rest of the week they sleep in separate rooms because there’s no reason not to.

Julian arrives home at six in the morning to a house that’s blessedly quiet, free of fidgeting and sweets' wrappers. He sits in the kitchen, head pillowed on his arms as beams of sunlight splash over him, and feels lonelier than he ever has in his life.

The only difference between Noel and an actual child is that children wake early. Within an hour the kitchen is full of porridge and sippy cups, and the high-pitched wail of a toddler with a broken toy.

“Arthur, come on, sweetheart,” he hears Julia say gently from the sitting room, where she’s buttoning the boys into their coats. Arthur’s cries continue to pierce the air. “It’s alright. Look, let’s show this to Daddy and see what he can do. Walter, stay here for me, you need your shoes.”

She walks in with a toy car in one hand and Arthur hanging onto the other.

“Hey, mister.” Julian lifts his son up into his lap. Julia sets the car on the table beside them, gives him one of the more serious ‘please deal with this and make it fast, we’re running late’ looks she’s patented and disappears again, presumably to deal with toddler footwear. “What’s all this about?”

“Car breaked,” Arthur says between shaky gulps of air. Julian picks the car up, turning it over in his hands. It’s the new one, of course, the one Arthur picked out as a reward for being brave at the doctor’s a fortnight ago. When he left it was red and sporty, racing stickers plastered over its roof and along the rear spoiler. Now it’s got a scratch down one side and the snapped-off spoiler is sitting forlornly on the table. 

“That’s no good, is it?” He ruffles Arthur’s hair with one hand, setting the car back down. “What if we buy you another one, eh? One that can’t break.”

“Want that one,” Arthur wails, erupting into a fresh wave of tears. 

“Okay,” Julian says, rubbing little circles on his back. “Hey? It’s okay. Daddy will fix your car.”

Arthur sniffs miserably and rubs at his eyes. “Fix car?” he echoes.

“Yep. Make it all better. But _you_ ,” Julian lifts him off his lap, “we need to get you dressed so Mummy can take you and your brother to playgroup. Okay? So let’s find your shoes.”

It takes ten minutes, a scruffy brown bear and two more promises to fix his car to get Arthur dressed and out the door. Julian waves goodbye to them both from the doorstep and only heads back in when the car is out of sight. 

There’s a tube of glue in a drawer in the kitchen. He makes a pot of tea and takes it, the glue, the car and yesterday’s newspaper into his study. 

The broken plastic is clean and smooth; when the glue’s on and he’s set the missing piece back into place, he can barely see the thin line of the join. Julian presses on the glued section firmly, counting in his head to the recommended sixty seconds. His lets his gaze drift around the room as he does so, tracking dust motes in the air. When his time’s up, he sets the car down carefully on the desk, and his hand brushes the spine of the book he took down before he left, the one he forgot to take on the flight with him. The photograph that fell from it is still sitting beside it.

He picks it up gingerly with his non-sticky hand. Noel’s face grins up at him. 

It was a birthday dinner, Julian remembers, a night or two after his actual birthday. Four, maybe five years ago; him and Dave and Dee, and all Noel’s family, squashed around a little kitchen table. Noel’s face had grown pinker and pinker as they’d sung to him until finally he’d buried it in his hands and leaned into Julian’s side, like that was somehow going to make them all disappear. Julian had laughed and slung an arm around him, and when he’d looked up again, Noel’s mum had had her camera waiting, which made him repeat the whole process over again.

He’d shown Julian a fistful of photos about a month later, with a mumbled explanation about how his parents were proper old school and liked to keep albums of family gatherings. He’d put all the rest back into their paper envelope but this one he’d pushed across the table with a coy grin.

“Won’t your mum want it back?” he’d asked, but Noel had just shaken his head. 

“You’re family too, Ju,” he’d said, and then disappeared to make tea and mischief, so Julian had tucked it away into the closest book he could find, rolling his eyes a little.

He looks back to the car on his desk and the little tube of glue that mended it so easily. He looks at Noel, at the long black hair that had hung past the neckline of his t-shirt and curled up at the ends. At his eyes, that shone and sparkled even in two dimensional format.

It isn’t a crack, this break in them. He and Noel made whole worlds together, iridescent spheres of glass and spun sugar that he smashed with his stubbornness and left in apathetic pieces on the floor behind him. 

There’s not enough glue and promises in the world to mend a shattered globe.

Hours later, the noise of a key in the lock reaches his ears. Loud, happy squawks fill the hallway’s silence. His family - but not all of them. Just the ones he chose to protect.

Julian stands slowly. The newspaper crackles in his hands when he balls it up, and clangs dully when he tosses it in the bin. The cold remains of the tea slosh in the pot. He tucks the tube of glue into a trouser pocket; he leaves the car on his desk to dry overnight. 

He sets the photo beside it, leaning it against a framed picture of the twins, to remind himself that there’s one family member missing and it’s no one’s fault but his.


	14. 27 (December 2010) / 28 (January 2011)

_i stay because you’re the beginning of the dream i want to remember_  
 _[december 2010]_  


People only ever said it would be hard. One tiny word. They didn’t talk about the days he’d spend lying in bed, aching with the pain of the real world. They didn’t tell him about the exhaustion that would come in the wake of willpower. They didn’t say that sometimes he'd end up screaming himself hoarse at the people he loved, that he'd try to make them hate him just so he had a proper reason to feel shitty. 

They didn’t tell him that months later, when he finally believed himself better, a single stray memory would be enough to bring all the hurt and hardness rushing back. 

Noel pulls the door shut harder than he needs to. There’s icing sugar snow from last night dusted everywhere. Tiny flecks of it drop down off the lintel and melt into his fringe. He stuffs his hands as far into his coat pockets as he can get them and walks. Aimlessly down streets, around corners. It’s freezing, but it’s better than sitting inside his flat feeling like he wants to peel his own skin off.

He wonders how much colder it is in Yorkshire, and if that’s where Julian’s gone. He’s gone _somewhere_ , because no light’s filtered through from his front room into Noel’s bedroom for two nights now. He supposes they could have gone somewhere warm, but it’s almost the end of December and Julian has two toddlers with doting grandparents. 

Noel has cold fingertips and a burning need for something that will make him forget.

He kicks petulantly at a pebble. It skims the thin layer of snow that coats the footpath and chinks, quite delicately, against a red brick wall. Noel frowns, looking up in surprise. He’s walked all the way to the cemetery. He peers in through the bars of the gate to the empty palette of chiascuro beyond.

He remembers when he used to love it here.

There’s a load of change in his pockets. He makes his way around to the main entrance quickly before he can change his mind, fishing out the coins as he goes; these he presses quietly and deliberately into the waiting attendant’s hand. And then he walks again, letting his feet remember. Down the neat, broad avenues, past the angel who lies eternally on her side, hands pressed together under her cheek. Away from Marx and Adams and Patrick Caulfield. The narrower paths aren’t as well cleared and Noel can feel the cold of the slush and snow through his boots, but he keeps going, left, then right, then left again, until he reaches the birdbath.

It’s never been full, even in the summer. Last time it had been covered in thick, glossy moss and they’d joked about dreaming peacocks using it for health cocktails. Now it houses the skeletons of leaves, piled one on top of the other, encrusted with ice. His eyes move from the birdbath to the stone bench behind it. Julian had sat there, resting his head on the palm of his hand. Noel had stretched out in the overgrown grass at his feet and inked tiny flowers up his own left arm in purple felt tip while the sun filtered down on them. 

He hasn’t drawn violets for almost four years. He still feels sick every time he sees them.

He shivers and shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, curling his fingers into his palms. It’s nothing to do with the cold, he knows, but he curls them anyway, pretending it will help, pushing and pressing until he feels the sting of fingernail in flesh. He pushes harder, wondering how long it would take if he called right now, if someone would be waiting by the time he got home. There are whole worlds in those plastic packets. Tiny, private worlds of crushed sugar and snow, dusted in neat lines across pocket-sized reflective ponds.

His brain realises his phone isn’t in his pocket before it realises that his hands are even feeling for it. His phone is at home, and the shivering won’t stop and he can feel his bones trembling. 

Noel sinks to his knees. The grass is still overgrown. The grass will always be overgrown here, but there’s no sun anymore, and no one with him, and his phone is at home. His cigarettes are at home. The grass is wet, ice melting under his kneecaps, and all he has to fight off the knife of memory are his cold, cramped fingers and his cold, shaking bones. 

He stays there, bent and shivering, counting his penance in pallid blades of grass. Four. Fifteen. Thirty-five. He screws his eyes shut. Fifty-seven. Eighty. A hundred and four. 

A high, reedy sound fills his ears. Noel stops counting and raises his head, but no fox or kestrel takes shape anywhere. His eyes sting now that they’re open; he rubs at them absently and his hand comes away wet, and the source of the sound finally sinks into his mind.

There’s a tiny movement against his forehead. He tilts his head to the sky, rubbing his eyes again, and feels another gentle brush, then a third. One by one snowflakes fall on him, plastering themselves into his hair, bumping against his cheeks like cold kisses. He remembers a song they kept playing a few Christmases ago, when he and Julian still spoke all the time instead of once every six months. 

He watches them fall, counting backwards this time. When he reaches zero, he stands. His limbs feel heavy. He aches with regret, with cold, with the awful yearning to forget. But forgetting is what brought him here, and forgetting is why Julian is two hundred miles north of him instead of laughing by his side like he should be. 

People said it would be hard. 

Noel runs a finger over the icy rim of the birdbath, imagining its inevitable thaw, imagining it coated in moss once more. _It’s been hard_ , he thinks. _It’s_ still _hard. It’s not fair._

No one ever said anything about fairness.

He turns his back on the birdbath. Every day of the past year has been hard, but nothing to come and nothing that’s passed has been as bad as standing here alone and shivering. Nothing could be as hard as living without the other half of himself. He tells himself he’ll throw the cigarettes in the bin when he gets home. He’ll erase all those numbers from his phone.

And he does. 

It’s light. Painless. His contacts disappear into a digital void, and it isn’t hard at all. 

Outside, snowflakes fall.

  


_you were too cruel to love for a long time_  
 _[january 2011]_  


It’s tea that brings them back together in the end, a beautifully ironic fact that Julian files away in his mind to laugh at when enough time has passed to allow for laughter.

He’s just dropping the box of tea into his basket when he hears footsteps clatter to a standstill to his left. He looks up automatically to see Noel, wide-eyed and white-faced. 

“Hey, Julian.” Noel’s voice is breathy and soft, like he’s trying to start a conversation in a school library. His hands flutter about at his sides for a second before he shoves them into the pockets of his oversized tartan coat. 

The three syllables of Julian’s name hit him squarely in the stomach. He’s not Ju, not now, but he’ll never get used to how wrong _Julian_ sounds coming from Noel’s mouth.

“Hey,” he says, trying to keep his voice light. “What y’doing?”

“Ran out of tea.” Noel takes half a step closer. His hands stay firmly wedged in his pockets.

“Yeah, us too.” Julian nods his head towards the basket on his arm, and immediately feels like a tit. _He’s got eyes_ , he tells himself sharply. _He can see that_.

“It’s this weather though, innit. It’s ridiculous, all that grey, I must’ve drunk twenty cups yesterday. Like that time - ”

It’s more words than Noel’s said to him in ages, as if he’s forgotten they don’t do this anymore. The unfinished sentence yawns like a chasm between them, but it doesn’t matter; Julian knows _exactly_ which time he means. The winter before their first tour it rained for weeks on end, and Noel had sat slumped on the sofa next to him, drawing listless faces and swallowing cup after cup of steaming hot liquid. Julian remembers all too well how he’d pulled the sketch book from Noel’s grasp and refused to make him another tea until he ate something, preferably something with green leaves and nutritional value. Noel had just looked up at him with pale, doleful eyes and said the grey had stolen all his appetite.

“Least it’s meant to fine up at the weekend, eh?” Julian cringes internally the second the words are out of his mouth. Fifteen years of phone calls and scripts and sleepless, wonderful nights, and all he can manage is comment on the fucking weather.

“Yeah.” Noel looks at his feet and starts scuffing the toe of one boot against the other. It makes him look impossibly young. Julian finds himself thinking of Arthur and Walter, and of a calico-haired boy who didn’t know how to ask him out, so he asked him in instead. He doesn’t ask anything at all now. The only sound left in the world they built is a tremulous, terrible silence. 

There has to be an end to it somewhere.

“So how are you?” Julian asks. It’s almost as ridiculous as the weather question, but his voice sounds gentle in his own ears and when Noel looks up through his fringe, it’s with a small smile. A small victory.

“Good. I mean, I’m bored stupid from all the rain, I can’t even think, and Lliana’s away so the house is too quiet for words but…” He breaks off again in the same way, and Julian’s wrenched by a deep, visceral wish for him to keep talking the way he used to, stringing his hundreds of words into those endless run-on sentences that somehow didn’t require him to breathe the same amount of air as ordinary people.

“But?” he prompts.

Noel looks up properly and smiles. It’s not dazzling, not the one Julian remembers so vividly, but it’s enough. 

“Nothing. I’m… I’m good,” he says again. The words hang heavily in the air, and Julian knows they can both feel the weight of them pressing down, laden with things Noel can’t voice.

_I’m trying._

“That’s good, Noel.” A sick, awful feeling settles in his stomach. Noel’s smile brightens at his words, which only makes it worse. “That’s really good.”

He’s trying. Noel is trying, and Julian realises that _this_ is where it ends, this is where it has to end, because Noel’s trying and he isn’t. That has to mean something.

He takes a deep breath. “We’re taking the boys out Saturday. Well, if it stops raining like they promised. Get them out of the house, you know. You could come too. If you like.”

The smile slips from Noel’s face immediately. His eyes track down to his boots again. “Oh. No, I should… You and Julia - ”

“Julia would love to see you. She’s missed you.” Noel makes a little noise halfway between a snort and a sigh. It’s a sound Julian hasn’t heard for years, one syllable that houses the volumes of self-doubt and shyness that strangers will never see. He swallows and steps forward to press a hand against Noel’s elbow. “We all have.”

Noel wrinkles his nose and ruffles the hair at the back of his neck with his other hand. “I don’t want to intrude, is all.”

“You wouldn’t be.” Noel makes his noise again and Julian wants all of a sudden to hug him, or slap him upside the head and tell him to stop being a berk. Or both. He settles for squeezing his elbow once, quickly, then letting go before he can’t stop himself. “Your choice, obviously. But you’d be welcome.”

“Thanks.” Noel looks up, finally. His eyes are too bright in the supermarket’s fluorescence. “I – um. I better get going then.”

“Don’t forget your tea.” Julian plucks a black and gold box of the shelf and hands it to him.

“How’d you - ”

“You _always_ get that one. And you’ll want the hundred box because otherwise you’ll be back here buying more tomorrow.”

Noel looks at him for a moment with an odd expression. “Am I ever gonna be able to keep secrets from you?”

“Not likely.” Julian tucks his basket back up onto his arm. “See you at the weekend maybe, yeah? Give us a call.”

“Maybe, yeah,” Noel echoes and Julian side-steps him to head for the till. He’s gotten about four steps when Noel calls out. “Hey, Julian?”

“Mmm?” He pivots around to face Noel again. Noel gestures with his box of tea.

“You’ve got the same one.” It’s almost a question. “But you always used to get that Yorkshire tea.”

He sounds so unsure, as if he’s remembering wrongly. “Yeah,” Julian says, exaggerating wryness. “But someone made me try this once and I got used to it.” 

He turns again and leaves this time, but not before he’s seen Noel face light up like the stars, his smile wide and brilliant as he gives a little wave goodbye.


	15. 29 (September 2011) / 30 (July 2012)

_you made the nomad in me build a house and stay_  
 _[september 2011]_  


It’s easy to spot Julian. He’s right where he said he’d be, in a dark brown jacket, a blinding anomaly among the yellowing leaves and bright colours of the park’s playground. There’s only a few dozen yards separating them: a gate, a couple of paths, some drying puddles. 

Noel stops walking, twisting his hands into the ends of his rainbow scarf. He looks down at his feet, clad in scuffed white boots he hasn’t worn for years. They seemed like such an obvious choice in his bedroom, a little reminder of happier days. Out here in the glary autumn sunlight, they’re too bright, _too_ obvious. His knee-length black coat flaps obnoxiously every time the wind blows, its scarlet lining like a gash, bleeding out his secrets.

He wonders very briefly if he should go home and change, but even as he thinks the words Julian looks up and it’s too late. He waves instead, gritting his teeth, and picks his way across the grass to the little green bench Julian’s sitting on.

“Alright?” 

“Yep. You?” 

“Yeah.” Noel makes himself grin, a quick lopsided flash of teeth.

“How’d you go then?”

His smile softens into something unforced, smaller and close to his heart. “Good. Really good. I mean, Dave was better, he had a proper speech and everything. But it was pretty amazing.” Fragments of his barely-scripted words float back into his head and he breaks off, stifling a giggle. “I nearly did the erection joke.”

“ _Noel_.”

“I didn’t mean to! You know how that one is though, it just comes out. I was nervous. How often do I have to say clever things on stage?”

“You could, though. You’re hardly thick.” A rueful smirk creeps over Julian’s face. “God, imagine their faces if you had.”

“I reckon a couple of kids knew where it was going, too. It would have been genius.”

“And then they’d have de-Mastered you in five seconds flat.”

“Probably, yeah.” 

He trails off into a sigh that hangs between them, unbroken and unhurried. It stretches out into a space that’s too long, like they used to be before they spent every hour together, when they didn’t know each other’s worlds and spaces still made them shy. 

“So.” Julian clears his throat, cracking the silence. “What now?”

Noel shrugs, staring out across the park, absently counting the leaves that drift to the ground as they talk. “I dunno. I’ve got loads on, I should probably start thinking about some of it. The new season of Buzzcocks in a couple of weeks, and stuff for the book, and there’s this art show in October, I wanted to do a new piece for them.”

“Busy, then.”

“Mmm.”

“I was thinking.” 

Julian’s voice is odd and tight. Noel snaps his attention back, a sick feeling washing over him. Julian’s eyes are trained on his own shoes. Whatever he’s been thinking, Noel thinks he probably doesn’t want to hear it.

“We should do the movie,” Julian continues, the words tumbling from his mouth to pile at his feet. “When you’re not busy. Well, whenever really, there’s loads of time. But if you still thought – well. I’m just putting it out there.”

Noel blinks at him owlishly, trying to work out if he’s completely misheard. They haven’t spoken about the film for ages. He hasn’t even thought about it, because thinking meant what if’s and the what if’s always hurt. He tells himself firmly that Julian’s just being polite and trying to include him again, and then Julian’s eyes rise to meet his and he finds, very suddenly, that it’s his turn to study the dirt. 

“No, we should,” he says quietly. “That’d be cool.”

Another space wallows along, enveloping them. Noel wishes he could poke at it, change its shape like he does the lumpy cushions, or cut it off like the loose threads in his coats. He kicks at the air with pointed toes.

“What about you then?” he asks, before it can become too large. “Anything on?”

“Not really. Julia’s already planning Christmas.”

“Her and half the shops.” Noel wrinkles his nose. “They were playing carols in Marks the other day, it gave me a panic rash.”

“I know. But she’s got it in her head that this is our last year for a proper holiday, because the boys’ll be at school next year.” Julian huffs a bit, folding his arms over his chest. “Like three weeks in Yorkshire in the dead of winter is a holiday. We’d be better off going in summer, at least then I could take them up the moors to run about. They nearly drove mum and dad mental last year. Speaking of.” 

He looks over to the playground. Noel follows his gaze, picking out the matched blonde heads that are chasing each other left and right like devils. He wonders, watching them, how it would feel to have a twin. He imagines days of secret languages and telepathy, of orbiting one another like symbiotic stars. 

When he looks back, Julian’s eyes are fixed on him. There’s a small, pleased little quirk to his mouth.

“You look really well, you know,” he says, and then glances to where Noel’s got one leg crossed over the top of the other, raises an eyebrow and adds, “Nice boots, by the way.”

 _Fuck_. Noel squirms slightly, uncrossing his legs and tucking his feet under the bench, out of sight. “They’re alright. Old now though.”

“Just a bit. I remember when you bought them. Surprised you’ve still got them, to be honest. They’re a little… 2005, wouldn’t you say?”

He looks up sheepishly, feeling the warmth rise in his cheeks. Julian just rolls his eyes.

“Of course I noticed, you idiot. Anyway, I’m hardly likely to forget that bloody coat, am I? You were so precious about it.”

“It was new!” 

“Normal people don’t stop mid-blowjob to hang up a coat, new or otherwise.”

It’s about the last thing he ever expected to hear this afternoon, and Noel catches himself before his mouth can drop open in comic surprise and prove how much Julian’s words have thrown him. Instead he frowns, not caring that it probably looks more like a pout, and crosses his arms tightly. “It might’ve got crumpled.”

“You could’ve ironed it.”

“Normal people don’t have any energy left after sex to iron coats.”

“Touché,” Julian says with a smirk. He’s punctuated by a shrill cry as two sandy-haired comets come shooting across the park in unison.

“ _Daddeeee_!” one of them yells, echoed by the other. “Daddy! Walter won’t – Uncle Noel! _Uncle Noel_!” 

Without any warning, there’s a miniature human attempting to climb into Noel’s lap, and another one tugging on his hand. “Uncle Noel, push me!” one of them says, wearing a grin as wide as the sea. “Walter won’t push me on the swings, come push me, _please_.”

“No, he’s pushing _me_!” says the one on his lap, which is obviously Walter, though how Julian can actually tell them apart, Noel has no idea. He lifts Walter up under his armpits and plops him down onto the ground as he gets to his feet.

“Boys,” Julian begins, but Noel holds out both his hands to them.

“Maybe I could push both of you?” he says, as tiny, sticky hands clutch onto his fingers. “Show me these swings.”

He pushes them for what feels like an hour, one with each hand, until their feet are pointed up above the top bar of the swing set and their squeals fill his ears. His face hurts from laughing, with them and at them. By the time Julian appears at his side, Noel’s almost forgotten he was even there.

“Okay guys, that’s enough. Your mum’ll be cross if we’re not back for tea.” 

The twins drag their feet and grumble in tones that even Noel knows means they’re overtired, but they finally slip out of the swings and scramble up to Julian’s side. One little hand works its way back into Noel’s, tugging until he looks down at its owner.

“Will you come back tomorrow?”

“Walter, Uncle Noel has to work tomorrow.” Julian catches his eye over the top of his son’s head and makes an apologetic face. “But if you’re really good, he can come back soon, okay?”

“Promise?”

“Yeah,” says Noel, kneeling down to four year old height, but his eyes flicker back up to Julian’s as he swears it. “Yeah, I promise.”

  


_you’re a ghost town i’m too patriotic to leave_  
 _[july 2012]_  


Julia finally corners him when they’re on holiday, far from comforts and comfort-zones. He wonders if strategy is something girls are taught, in those secret lessons they all get separated for when high school starts. Or maybe it’s just instinct, the x-chromosome’s subtle reminder of who’s really the dominant one. Either way, Julian knows as soon as she looks at him that whatever discussion they’re about to have, she’ll win.

“So.” She’s propped up on one elbow, the point of it sinking into the soft white sand. Loose grains tumble and catch in the fibres of her towel. Ten feet away, the boys have a lumpy sandcastle underway and are murmuring happily to one another in the secret language of twins. Julia glances over to them, then back to Julian, her eyes studying him over the top of her sunglasses. “Are we going to talk about the two of you then?”

“What?”

“You and Noel. You’ve been spending a bit of time together lately.”

Julian fidgets on his own towel. He has no idea if he’s expected to agree. Julia doesn’t sound unhappy; her voice is carefully light, minimally curious, like she’s commenting on the weather. But if this were just an ordinary observation, she’d have said it before now. He hasn’t seen Noel for almost three weeks, and before that, not for six.

“He does live across the road,” he points out, unable to keep the defensive prickle from his words. “We’re bound to run into each other from time to time.”

“No, it’s a good thing! It’s been ages since you’ve done anything with him. Too long, really,” she adds softly, as if musing to herself. “You were a good influence on him, Jules. I think he needs that. Especially now. You used to be inseparable.”

Julian feels his mouth drop open, feels the incredulity spread across his face. He stares at her for a minute that feels like an hour, three years of anger and loneliness, self-recrimination and regret swirling and ebbing throughout him. “You were the one told me to stop answering his calls,” he manages at length.

“I know. Believe me, I know.” Julia pushes her sunglasses up onto the top of her head and looks at him properly. “It was a momentary lapse of judgement that I’ve felt guilty about for three years now. You never should have listened. The two of you are miles better together than you have been apart.”

Walter chooses that moment to shriek, “Daddy, look!” and Julian does, squinting into the sun, glad that it’s out and that he can blame it for any heat in his cheeks. The boys have dug a moat around the base of the castle and piled the damp clumps of sand up until the thing stands almost as tall as they do. 

“Very good,” he says and both of them laugh excitedly before stopping back down to continue the architectural tour de force. Julian watches them for a moment before turning back to Julia, nurturing a very small hope that she’s returned to her sunbathing.

“Anyway,” she continues blithely, as though the interruption never happened, “when we get back you should take him out.”

“Who?”

“ _Noel_.”

“Take him out where?”

“I don’t know – for dinner. To the zoo. Use your imagination, darling.”

“For dinner? Christ, we’re not fucking dating.”

“Well, maybe you should be.”

Julian finds himself staring again, aghast this time, not sure he’s actually heard what he thinks he’s heard but very sure he has no desire to hear it again. Julia ignores him, flicks her sunglasses back down nonchalantly and settles herself back onto the towel. The conversation couldn’t be more over if she'd rolled credits over the horizon.

For the rest of the day, he hears her words echoing in his head. _For dinner. Take him out. Use your imagination._

He can’t take him out, he thinks desperately. Despite Julia’s flippant words, he can count the number of times they’ve seen each other since the tea aisle on his fingers. And every time, every single one, he’s had Julia or the twins or both of them beside him. He can’t take Noel out, not without that safety net. Their conversations might be stilted, things might be more strained than they used to be, but they can never stray into danger when there are children to be watched and taken care of. He can never fall off the tightrope they’ve spent eighteen months learning to walk again.

Julian wakes the next morning with a nagging fear that Julia will use the new day to try again, but she says nothing more for the rest of their holiday. When he walks in the front door a week later, he thinks maybe, just once, it _was_ that easy. That he’s gotten lucky.

Two days after the boys start school, he walks into the kitchen to find Julia making tea. When she lifts her head, he realises luck is something that only the very young and very foolish believe in.

“Have you spoken to Noel yet?”

“About what?”

“You know what.”

“No.”

“Jules - ”

“ _No_. I know what you’re thinking, and no. We can’t just _go out_. We can’t hold hands and laugh and make everything wonderful again, that’s not how life works. And anyway, he has a girlfriend. _I_ have a girlfriend!”

Julia meets his exasperation with a level gaze. 

“I thought I might sleep in the spare room tonight.”

“You – no.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t just - ”

“I can, and I will. No, _listen_.” She holds up a hand, forestalling his protests. “You’ve got to have your outburst, now you can listen to mine. You never tried with him, Julian, not really. You were scared, then you had a girlfriend, then Noel had problems and you had children. And if the only thing stopping you trying is me sleeping in your bed, then I’ll happily spend the rest of the year in the spare room, because you’ve never given the two of you a proper chance and you need to. Both of you need you to.”

“And if it all goes to shit? What then?”

“Then at least you tried.” She walks around the table to his side and lays a soothing hand on his arm. “We’ll say I was finally wrong and forget it ever happened, okay? But you can’t read the last page first. You know that.”

Julian sinks down into a chair, knowing his defeat when he hears it. “Don’t move,” he says, resting his forehead on the palms of his hands. “You should be near the boys. I’ll sleep in the spare one.”

Julia’s hand hovers lightly over his shoulder. “If that’s what you want.”

“I don’t want any of it. But if you think it’ll help…”

“I do.” She gives his shoulder a squeeze. “I do, Jules.”

He doesn’t look up until she’s left the room. Getting heavily to his feet, Julian makes the strongest cup of tea he possibly can, wondering if it would be overly dramatic to add a nip of whiskey. 

He spends the rest of the afternoon sitting moodily at the table, staring at his phone as the tea grows slowly cold in front of him, trying to work out how on earth he can possibly ask Noel Fielding out.


	16. 31 / 32

_forgive me. i was lonely so i chose you._   
_[december 2012]_   


“Lee, I…”

He trails off, realising he has no idea what to say. It doesn’t matter. Lliana just lays a hand against his cheek.

“I know,” she says. It has an awful finality, worse than screams and tears. “I know.”

And then her hand slips away. She doesn’t look back until she’s reached the car.

“You’ll be okay, love. I’ll call in a few days. Just… take care of yourself.”

Noel watches as she drives away, then watches for five minutes more as the last of the light sinks into the start of a pale blue night. It seems wrong, this quiet suburban sunset, so he goes back inside where he can at least close the blinds and ignore it.

Inside is no better. There are gaps in the cd racks, pointing at him accusingly, and he realises that if he fills them, there will be nothing of her left. She will become the fog on the bathroom mirror, and the smear of paint he washes from his fingertips. He sits glaring back at the empty spaces for as long as he can stand it. Then he goes upstairs and spends two hours doing his hair.

Tonight he’s getting properly shit-faced. 

By the time he leaves, the darkness is absolute; by the time he’s downed four shots of vodka, danced and then downed a few more, the lights have gone soft and warm, and he feels slightly better, like maybe she’s right, maybe he _will_ be okay after all. 

A hand claps him on the shoulder, even as he thinks it. He turns to see a kid, grinning drunkenly. He’s vaguely familiar, a friend of a friend ( _of a friend?_ Noel wonders). The kid whispers - or maybe he shouts, it’s impossible to tell over the music - and holds out his palm. It’s sticky with sweat and alcohol and the sugar coating of pills. There’s two in it now, tiny and red, ruby slippers done in miniature. They stare at him, horrifyingly large for something so little. Red crowds his vision, presses against him. It murmurs lullabies like siren song. It smothers him with gentle, psychedelic fingers. 

Noel shakes his head. The walls drip and glisten with a bloody installation of all the words he shouted so long ago. He forces a smile in the kid’s direction, mimes ‘another drink’ and twists away. The red cracks into shards around him, tinkling and twinkling. He almost makes it out into the cold night air before the shaking starts. 

The breath he draws is sharp; it pierces his lungs. Sweat and tears carve itchy tracks down his face, and his heart’s pounding its way out through his ear drums. He won’t think, he can’t think. He can’t _breathe_. When he closes his eyes, all he can see is red.

His first awareness of the cab is a bored, polite voice in his ear.

“Twelve quid, mate.” 

Noel blinks slowly, once, twice. Shadowed eyes study him impassively from a rear view mirror. It’s not the look of a fan, just the weary gaze of a man who’s ferried home one too many Soho revellers already tonight.

“Right, yeah.” He passes over twenty, slipping from the cab even as he waves away the change. “Thanks,” he adds softly, pressing the door closed behind him.

He waits on the footpath, back to the cab as it moves away, chewing on his bottom lip. His house looms large in front of him, and despite what his panic-stricken subconscious obviously thought, he’s not sure he wants to go inside. The gaps in the cd racks will still be there.

“Noel?”

“ _Jesus_.” Noel spins around to look behind him. It takes his eyes a minute to find Julian in the darkness.; he’s ten feet away, all but lost in the shadow of his neighbour’s hedge.

“Sorry. You alright?”

“Aside from you frightening the life out of me, you mean? Yeah. Fine.” He takes a couple of idle paces towards Julian. Away from his empty spaces. “What you out here for? It’s fucking freezing.”

“Couldn’t sleep. Thought a walk might help.” 

Noel shoves his hands into his pockets as he reaches Julian. “Yeah? Mind if I...?”

“If you like,” Julian shrugs, as though Noel asking to join him for a walk in the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, is an everyday occurrence. The tiny glow of a cigarette tip peeps from his fingers. 

It’s not until they reach the end of the street that he speaks again, pausing outside the little row of shops in a pool of street light. He pulls his woollen coat tighter around him. His eyes work their way methodically over Noel’s face. “You sure you’re alright? You look like hell.”

“I’m tired.”

“Noel.”

“I’m just tired. I swear.” Noel draws a breath and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. His nose stings when he breathes in and clouds of fog hang around his face when he breathes out. “How’s Julia?” he asks softly, trying not to think about what his breath will look like in his empty house. 

“Stubborn. Infuriating. Right.” Julian shrugs. “I’m still in the spare room.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Julian starts walking again, towards the corner of his own street. “Anyway. What are you doing out if it’s so ‘fucking freezing’?”

There are about eleven thousand words crashing round in Noel’s head and none of them seem right. He steps over the cracks in the pavement. He counts the driveways they walk past, and wishes Julian’s was further away when it arrives under his feet. “Lee left,” he says finally, hating the soft lilt of the syllables on his tongue. It should sound horrible. Heartbreaking.

“When?”

“Today.”

“Fucking… Christ, I’m sorry.” 

“Me too.” 

Julian’s hand is resting on his elbow. Noel looks slowly from it to his face. When their eyes meet, Julian’s gaze drops to a frosty patch of ground near his feet.

“What happened?”

Noel studies him this time, biting fretfully at his lower lip. Julian’s been sleeping in that spare room for months now. He’s never said why, exactly, but Noel’s pretty sure he already knows. He swallows, picking his words carefully in case this is the only chance he’s got left.

“She says it’s cruel to keep me when my heart belongs to someone else.”

Julian says nothing. Noel waits, watching him watch his shoes, watching him stub out the remains of his cigarette. The silence hangs around them like the fog of his breath. He’s on the verge of saying goodnight and running back to his own house to hide in it forever, cd racks be damned, when Julian looks up. 

“Do you want to come in?”

“What?”

“I could make tea.”

“Oh. No, it’s… I mean, I should-”

“Your choice, obviously.” Their eyes meet again and this time Julian’s don’t slide away. Noel shifts under their scrutiny, worried that he’s said too much even though he basically said nothing at all. Julian smiles as he continues. “But you should probably know – if you do come in, you can never leave.”

Noel feels the grin break on his face. Laughter bubbles up out of him suddenly in shallow, hysterical gasps. Julian’s still smiling, honest and wide. It’s a smile he hasn’t seen in years, and Noel flings his arms around him, burying his face in the chest of the only person who’s ever properly understood him.

  


_his heart wasn’t as beautiful as his smile_   
_[january 2013]_   


“You could stay with me,” Noel says shyly to the real estate magazine he’s holding. Julian looks across at him from the endless tabs of properties on his computer screen and raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t think so.”

“I’m just saying, Ju.” He looks up, eyes wide and bright. “There’s a second bedroom, you know. And it’s not like you’re not there all day and half the night anyway.”

“No.” 

The brightness dims instantly, as though the sparkling blue glow is nothing more than a light someone has just put out. Noel shrugs, returning his gaze to the magazine. “S’fine. Whatever.” 

Julian pinches the bridge of his nose, drawing a breath, searching for the words he needs to make Noel see.

“It’s not… I don’t think it would be a good idea. Not yet. I - I missed you. I _still_ miss you. But we spent so long together before that I couldn’t tell where you finished and I started, and you know how that ended.”

“After _twelve years_ though.”

“All the same, it’s not something I plan to re-live any time soon. I don’t think I could do it a second time.”

Noel glances up again, sparkle firmly back in his eye and a small smile playing on his lips. “Miss me that much, did you?” 

Julian rolls his eyes and leans over to press a kiss to his temple. “That, and I couldn’t sleep for all the quiet.”

“Liar,” Noel smirks, just as a voice calls out from the hall, ‘Jules?’ “Fuck,” he hisses and before Julian can tell him to calm down, he’s bolted off the sofa and out of the room.

Julia walks in, arms laden with shopping bags. 

“I - ” Her eyes travel the living room, touching on the fleece-collared jacket and the empty sweet wrappers all over the coffee table. She sets the bags onto an armchair. “Where’s Noel?”

Julian rubs his jaw with one hand, gesturing absently with the other. “Kitchen, maybe? He seems to have reverted back _to five-year-old_.” He raises his voice on the last words, calling them out in the kitchen’s direction. The only reply is a deep, ringing silence.

Julia sighs. “Well. I just wanted to bring these home before we run out of car space. Mum seems to think that the imminent return to school is a valid reason to buy the boys a small house worth of presents. _Each_.” She nods towards the kitchen. “Give him my love? It would have been nice to see him again.”

“I will.” Julian sighs tiredly. “I’m sorry.”

“No it’s fine. He’s always hated confrontation. He does know I’m not going to bite his head off, doesn’t he?”

“Honestly? I don’t know. Anything’s possible, he’s still blaming himself for all of it.”

Julia sits down beside him, resting her hand on top of his. It’s gentle and comforting and he wonders, not for the first time in the last few months, what saint it was that really gave birth to her. 

“He’ll be alright,” she says softly, peering at the computer in his lap. “You still looking? How’s it going?”

“Slowly.” 

“You don’t have to, you know. I meant what I said last week, I can take the boys to mum and dad’s for a bit. They don’t - ”

“No.” 

Noel’s voice startles the both of them; they jump in unison. Julian twists around to see him standing in the kitchen doorway. His face is ashen, his eyes huge and terrified.

“Noel. Hi,” Julia breathes. Julian doesn’t need to look at her to know her eyes will be almost as wide as Noel’s are.

“Hi.” Noel speaks softly, but his whispers might as well be screams. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“It’s alright,” she replies. It’s like watching a tennis match, Julian thinks, flicking his eyes sickeningly from one to the other. “How are you?”

Noel frowns, his face puzzled, as though the question’s in Swahili. “I’m… You don’t need to go anywhere. I said Ju could have my spare room if he wants. I don’t – it’d mess with the boys’ school if you moved.”

And somehow, between blinks, Julia’s moved from Julian’s side to stand beside Noel. Her hands clutch onto his tightly. “Oh, love, my parents aren’t even two miles from here. It’s not a mess. But – are you sure?”

Noel nods and she reaches up to stroke his hair from his eyes, like she’s petting a frightened kitten or puppy. “Because I think that might be nice for the two of you.”

“Sorry?” Julian sets the computer to one side. The vaguely hysterical thought that he’s fallen into some sort of house-hunting coma flits through his mind. He can’t _actually_ be hearing this. “Forgotten someone, haven’t you? Don’t I get some sort of say in all this?”

“No,” Julia and Noel reply together. Noel’s eyes meet Julia’s and when she giggles, he finally, _finally_ , relaxes enough to smile back. 

Julian stares at them for a long moment. His girlfriend and his best friend, he thinks to himself, but he’s not really sure which is which. “Women,” he snorts, hoping the disgust reaches their ears. “Right, well I’ll just make the tea then, shall I?”

“That’d be excellent,” Julia says, without taking her eyes off Noel’s.

Julian slips past them into the kitchen and fills the kettle. He sets it gently into its cradle but before he flicks the switch, he pads back to the doorway. Noel’s voice drifts into his ears.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I never wanted…”

“Shhh, don’t be silly, love. We just want you to be happy.” He chances a peek around the corner. Julia’s hands are clasped around one of Noel’s. She brings it up to press her lips gently against his knuckles, the same way she does when Arthur or Walter are sick and she’s saying goodnight. “I think you deserve that, don’t you? You’ve waited long enough.”

Noel, ridiculous as ever, doesn’t say a word. He just flings his arms around Julia and buries his face in her shoulder, and Julian’s heart jumps up to lodge in his throat. Before he has to hear the sobbing he knows will come, he walks back to the kettle and flicks it on. Methodically, he takes three mugs from the cupboard, three teabags from the jar. The milk from the fridge. He lines them up on the counter, one by one.

He drums his fingers against the countertop as waits for the kettle to boil, wondering exactly how much stuff he’s really going to need to take over to Noel’s place.


	17. 33 / 34

_he knows all of my secrets and still wants to kiss me_  
 _[march 2013]_  


The newest patch of colour on the living room wall is dry. Noel kneels down beside the sofa in the space he cleared earlier and paints a tiny butterfly, smaller than his own hand, over the top of it. She dances on the square field of spring green, a new friend for the Tiger Spider in honour of the season’s first day.

He smiles at her. Julian appears in the doorway.

“Alright?” Noel clambers to his feet and drops the paint brush into a jar of water. Julian doesn’t reply. He’s wearing an odd, unreadable expression. “Ju?”

“Sorry. Sorry, I was - ” Julian frowns, tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. “I just found something.”

Noel’s heart stops dead for a long, sickening second. Then it races. His mind careens around all the possible somethings that Julian could have found to make his face look like it currently does, and comes back with one answer. 

He’s had no parties – not real ones, not for ages – but there are piles of stuff scattered around the house. Books and cds and art supplies he’s been meaning to sort out for the past two years and never found the time. If anyone dropped _anything_ in amongst that… He can feel the fledgling peace he and Julian have built crumbling around him.

“It’s not - ” The words stick in his throat like barbs. He tries again, knowing it’s futile, knowing no one has ever made this sentence sound sincere, even when it’s true. “It’s not mine. I swear, Ju, it’s not mine.”

“What?”

“The - ” There is one word that will never unstick. “Whatever you found. It – I dunno, maybe someone left it here, but I promise, I _promise_ , I wouldn’t do that to you. Not again.”

“You – oh, Noel.” Julian laughs a little; it sounds weak and sickly in Noel’s ears. “It’s not that.” 

Before he can ask what, if not _that_ , Julian’s vanished back into the hallway. He reappears a moment later carrying a large, rectangular board.

Noel recognises it immediately. He takes it from Julian with shaking hands, mentally cataloguing it as their fingers brush. He never knows the dates of his paintings, but he’ll always, always know this one. _A3 sketch, pastel on backing board. February, 2010._

“It was under the bed in the spare room.” Julian raises an eyebrow quizzically. “I don’t remember you doing it.”

“You weren’t there,” he says quietly, studying the portrait. It’s infinitely more detailed than his usual work. Long, fine lines of pigment map out the contours of Julian’s face. He remembers shading it, stretched out on his stomach on the floor of his studio, smudging flakes of muffin and mocha into scruffy locks of hair with the tip of his little finger. “It was a couple of years ago. I thought I left it in the studio.”

He glances up quickly through his messy fringe, but if Julian knows that last bit is a lie he’s not showing it. He just peers down at the sketch thoughtfully.

“What photo did you use?”

“Didn’t.”

Julian frowns at that. “You always use a photo.”

“I don’t need a picture to remember your face, Ju,” Noel says softly, setting the portrait down on the coffee table. He lays one hand against a familiar, bristly cheek. “I’ve seen it in my sleep every night for fifteen years.”

“Creep,” Julian says fondly, folding him into a crushing hug.

Later, when the tea has been drunk and Noel’s drying the last of the dishes, Julian’s arms slip round his middle. A warm, murmuring breath flits past his ear.

“Coming to bed?”

Noel puts the last stray fork down and twists to face him. Without shoes on, he’s so much shorter; Julian doesn’t even have to stretch to press a kiss to the crown of his head.

“Give me a minute?”

Julian nods sleepily, smothering a yawn with one hand. Noel waits until he’s heard the bedroom door shut. He slides the silverware quietly into its drawer and slips out into the night. 

It’s freezing on the little balcony. Clouds fat with the promise of snow skitter restlessly across the dark. The moon hangs low in the sky, peering between them. It’s almost full tonight, a cuddly old friend almost close enough to touch. Noel smiles at it.

“Thank you,” he whispers. The moon still says nothing, but this time, he knows it’s heard.

The lights are already out when he reaches the bedroom. He navigates by the muted rays of moon and streetlight that are creeping in around the corners of the blinds, shucking his clothes and pulling on his favourite of the old, soft t-shirts he sleeps in. Julian barely stirs when he climbs into bed. He tugs the blankets up over their heads and inches over to him, wraps his limbs around Julian’s drowsy warmth. 

Noel falls asleep smiling, his face nestled into the crook of Julian’s neck.

  


_loving you was like going to war, i never came back the same_  
 _[may 2013]_  


It has to be Australia, of course. It’s where everything started, really. Julian takes him for his birthday, doesn’t tell him where they’re going until they’re almost at the airport, by which stage he figures he’ll work it out soon enough from the departure boards. Noel whines and pleads and actually has the nous to sneak into his email at one point, but the confirmations are tucked away safely in another account, and Julian just shakes his head and points out that it doesn’t matter where they’re going because he’ll spend the first two days buying an entirely new wardrobe anyway.

Noel’s mildly pacified by that.

For all the time that’s passed, the landmarks haven’t changed that much. Or maybe it’s just that the beach is burnt onto his memory like an aquatic elephant graveyard. The sky above them is as clear as the one in his mind, the same indifferent stars throwing handfuls of glitter over the same black blanket of ocean. Julian squints up at them, remembering all the things he knows about stars, and wonders if they really are still up there, shedding hydrogen and helium, dying by cold degrees.

He sits cross-legged in the sand, suddenly feeling as old as hell. 

Noel sinks down beside him, fussing with the sand in his boots. He’s still ethereal, Julian realises: his hair’s the wrong colour, but it’s grown out into almost the right shape and when he smiles, his eyes still light up with that mad blue fire. He smiles now, and leans his head gently against Julian’s shoulder.

Julian looks up at the stars again and reminds himself how long it takes their light to reach the earth. _Four years for the closest ones, but most of these are older than that. Ten, fifteen, maybe twenty-five years._

He turns, slowly, and lifts Noel’s chin with the tip of his finger, watching him. Noel watches right back. He looks for all the world like barely a day has passed, like he’s a second chance.

Julian twists their fingers together and gives him the answer he should have given so long ago. “I love _you_ a bit.”

Noel smiles his stupidest, most precious lopsided smile. Starlight that’s been falling for twelve years dances across his face and Julian kisses it from his lips. It tastes like home. Family. Fate.

**Author's Note:**

> Firstly, a huge, huge thanks to my beta readers – Therese, Cherie, and Other Lil - and to my Brit-pickers (Therese and Syren for our favourite Southern flower, and Tree and my Leeds-born mother-in-law for the Northern gardener). And thanks also to every person who’s encouraged me over the past seven months. I owe you more than gratitude; I doubt I’d be posting this if not for you.
> 
> The title and vignette headers are taken from Warsan Shire's [34 Excuses for Why We Failed at Love](http://wireface.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/34-excuses-for-why-we-failed-at-love.html). I've re-arranged the lines but otherwise they're hers, not mine. I've also taken massive liberties with time, space and people's relationships, so once and once only: Noel and Julian belong to themselves. I just like to make them kiss from time to time.
> 
> *
> 
> A short note on language: I have at times used contradictory terms. Noel, for instance, thinks of that room with the telly and the big rug and the chairs you sit on as a ‘front room’, while Julian calls it a ‘sitting room’. (In my family, we alternate between front room and lounge room, depending on whose house we’re in, but my best English friend calls it a living room. TERMINOLOGY IS CONFUSING.) The choices are deliberate and if I couldn’t find them saying the term I wanted in an interview, I went with the most likely option based on regional dialect. The only exception is sofa – I’m 99% sure Julian would call it a settee, based on aforementioned Leeds-in-laws - but since none of my Brit-pickers would agree, I went with the safest option; Noel says sofa, and sofas are what they’re sold as in furniture stores. Whatever the term, if you’ve heard either of the boys saying it differently, please, do let me know. (And I know I’m going to get comments on ‘front room’ from someone, so see also [The Guardian](http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/may/25/comedy.art).)
> 
> An even shorter note on music: the version of “Song for the Road” that I have is from about 2005, and has vanished entirely from the internet. It is, in all honesty, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I know in my notes I say I don’t support music piracy, and I don’t - this is a live recording from a gig, I believe - but if you love this song and want to hear the version that stole my heart, do send me a message. I’d be very happy to pass it on.
> 
> As always, hundreds of things I’ve included in here were inspired by real life. Some are big, some are little, all of them belong to their original creators. This is a list of the ones I can remember.
> 
> Francesca Lia Block’s _Ecstasia_ ; Noel jumping like a fairy in the Damien Hirst documentary; Jack Kerouac’s _On the Road_ ; Neil Gaiman’s _Snow, Glass, Apples_ (and pretty much everything else he ever wrote); Luxury Comedy and _The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton_ ; Miniscule, for its beautiful animation of the French countryside; The Killers’ "Hot Fuss"; Lawrence M. Krauss’ seminar on evolution; my synesthesia; Chuck Palahniuk’s _Lullaby_ ; Something for Kate’s “Leave Your Soul to Science”, which I listened to on endless repeat; Rousseau’s jungle paintings; Fall Out Boy’s entire discography; Paddington Bear; Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ ; the Renaissance artists who were so obsessed with Lucifer (Gustave Dore, Rubens, D’Oggiono, Lorenzo Lotto, Marco Pino); The Wizard of Oz (film, sorry purists); Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_ ; _Alice in Wonderland_ and The Three Bears; Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”; Sarah Hall’s _How to Paint a Dead Man_ ; e. e. cummings, for just generally being inspiring; my baby niece; a meteor shower over my house; Tom Robinson; and, apparently, Doctor Who. 
> 
> And a very special thank you to Cherie, who threw me the line about the butterfly on a marshmallow when I was having the 47th bout of writer’s block.


End file.
